The Pennsylvania eHealth Partnership confirmed that Lehigh Valley Health Network successfully completed all requirements for certification as a Pennsylvania eHealth Partnership Uniform Participant in the Pennsylvania Patient and Provider Network on Feb. 1.

LVHN went live the same day as a certified health information organization. As a member of P3N, care providers can securely send and receive a patient’s complete and real-time health history from any other HIO on the Pennsylvania P3N network, joining more than 55 other Pennsylvania health organizations in the P3N network in over 124 locations, including HIOs coordinated by Geisinger, Main Line Health, Penn State Hershey, UPMC and others.

Michael Minear, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, LVHN, said, “LVHN is excited to add this new connection to P3N as a certified HIO in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The breadth of the six P3N partners and networks will support LVHN sharing patient data in a secure way with even more care providers in Pennsylvania, especially long-term care and smaller ambulatory practices.”

Patient health information remains within the provider’s electronic medical record, and P3N is another way to exchange medical records with other health care organizations that request them for treatment. LVHN adds this latest tool to share patient data to other health information exchange tools that LVHN has had in place for many years, sharing over 46,123,171 records with more than 3,968 other health care organizations. These include:

• LVHN is a full member of the national HIE called the eHealth Exchange (formerly known as Sequoia). This HIE connects LVHN to many other care providers and many are governmental agencies, including the Social Security Administration, Veterans and Department of Defense DOD’s military hospitals.

• Epic Care Everywhere, used to share standard and enhanced data sets with other Epic customer organizations.

• The Carequality HIE that connects LVHN to many care providing organizations that use an EHR that is not Epic.

• Interfaces using the DIRECT standard where LVHN shares patient data with smaller practices via the Surescripts HIE.

• The Surescripts national E-Prescribing network.