Why Elation Health supports CMS’ proposal to send discharge or ADT feeds from hospitals for improved interoperability

On June 3rd, Elation Health joined 33 other organizations to submit a letter in support of a CMS proposal which would require hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid to send event notifications – also known as admission/discharge/transfer or ADT feeds – to other health care facilities or community providers.

Why is this important? If adopted, hospitals would be required to tell independent practices when a patient is admitted. This allows primary care physicians to know that their patients have been admitted to the hospital, which can drive critical follow-up and longer-term preventative activities to reduce readmissions.

Currently, many hospitals choose not to share ADT feed alerts for competitive reasons, even though they have the ability to share this information. As the organizations in the letter stress, “these notifications are critical to improving patient safety through better care transitions and are key to enabling value-based care at scale.” By having access to ADT feeds, independent physicians can spend less time trying to understand pertinent details around admissions, discharges, transfers, and encounters for their patients to ensure optimal follow-up care.

Elation Health strongly supports any initiative that attempts to streamline data sharing, especially when it is in the interest of patient care. A number of studies have demonstrated how valuable this kind of data exchange could be for readmission rates and other areas of patient care.

As the only EHR platform that signed onto this letter, we are eager to continue advocating for improved interoperability standards. At the same time, we’ve invested in features like our Collaborative Health Record to put the patient’s story in the center of their care experiences, whether that includes visits to physicians in-network or out of network.

Click here to learn more about our commitment to improving interoperability.