The Queen's Medical Center set to launch a new internal app that will aid clinicians working in Electronic Medical Records.

The Queen's Medical Center will launch the Hawaii Health Information Exchange (HHIE) app onto IllumiCare's Smart Ribbon platform to provide clinicians with a full patient history from all hospitals in the state via its Electronic Medical Record (EMR).

"Hawaii is at the forefront of this," G.T. LaBorde, CEO of IllumiCare, said in an interview with Pacific Business News.

LaBorde also said IllumiCare, based in Birmingham, Ala., originally created the app for Queen's and is now working on implementing it at other Hawaii systems such as Hawaii Pacific Health.

IllumiCare's Smart Ribbon app was designed as a toolbar that hovers over the EMR screen and allows clinicians to access apps more easily without disrupting the workflow of the clinician and is used by hospitals throughout the country to track spending on patients.

IllumiCare developed the HHIE app at its own expense and declined to give PBN an estimated cost for doing so.

Queen's has been a customer of IllumiCare for several years and the HHIE data exchange has been in place now for 10 to 15 years consolidating clinical data from every major Hawaii health system.

"As Hawaii’s designated health information exchange, with over 1,300 providers who are registered users, we are excited to find an EHR [electronic health record]-agnostic platform that embeds HHIE into the clinical workflow and reduces the number of required clicks to access our community health record, affording providers easier access to our rich clinical data,” Francis Chan, CEO of HHIE, said in a statement.

With the app, clinicians at Queen's will have access to a more complete view of health care history available on a patient from 22 Hawaii hospitals.

"The vision has always been to make health care more efficient and to make it cheaper for the patient and insurance companies," LaBorde said. "The hope is making EMR more readily accessible for clinician so they can reduce the duplication of services that ultimately waste time and money. There's nothing more frustrating than having to give blood twice or repeating a scan that was already taken someplace else. This not only makes the data more accessible, but also gives the patient less of headache when working with their medical providers as a whole."