Clinical Messaging: Imagine your hospital zapping you lab results every day

Some efforts by hospitals and doctors to share clinical data electronically on a regional basis have floundered. Not in Indiana.

Thirty-three hospitals in the Hoosier State send test results and other patient information to more than 7,000 doctors through a clinical messaging service called DOCS4DOCS. Last year, the number of messages increased from roughly 15 million to almost 30 million.

DOCS4DOCS is a service of the five-year-old Indiana Health Information Exchange, an example of a RHIO, or regional health information organization. A number of RHIOs across the country have folded, while others have yet to become operational, making the experiment in Indiana a relative “RHIO grande.”

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