Clinical Summaries
 

The Florida Health Information Exchange (HIE) offers two separate services that allow for the secure exchange of protected health information in electronic format.

  1. Patient Look-up and Delivery (PLU) allows clinicians to access patient records from participating networks organization or other sources as needed when treating patients.  The software that is used to facilitate this service is called Express/Express Lite.  This software allows regional and self-contained HIE Networks to communicate with each other.
  2. Direct Secure Messaging (DSM) is a “stand-alone” service offered by the HIE. DSM is designed as a secure e-mail system that allows participants to push encrypted health information to other participants. The software that is used to enable this service is called P2P.  This software allows registered users to send structured or unstructured information to other registered providers instead of faxing or manually transporting the information.
Patient Look-Up and Delivery
 
The PLU service has been promoted by the Agency and Harris alike in public forums (such as trade shows and regional HIE stakeholder meetings) as well as through the Florida HIE website and mass-distributed emails, with the intention of reaching a wide audience of organizations (hospitals, RHIOs, IPAs, etc.) at once. The general approach with specific, individual organizations has been to wait for them to initiate contact and then respond accordingly.  Typically, a follow-up meeting or series of follow-up meetings are conducted by Harris with an entity that expressed interest in the PLU service to ensure that there is a good understanding of participation requirements and of the entity’s current technical situation.

 

Direct Secure Messaging
 
There are three specific objectives for DSM outreach:
  1. Educate healthcare provider groups and individual providers on the benefits of DSM.
  2. Establish a strong user base among the targeted population of healthcare providers.
  3. Distinguish DSM as an individual HIE service that is separate but correlated to PLU.
 
The target audience for DSM is outlined in the following table:

Organizations/Facilities  Individual Providers​​
Ambulatory Surgical Centers
Clinical Laboratories
Community Mental Health Centers
Department of Health
Hospices
Federally Qualified Health Centers
Hospitals
Nursing Home Facilities
Regional Health Information Organizations
Rural Health Clinics

Certified Nurse Midwives
Chiropractic Physicians

County Health Department Clinicians
Dental Practice
Nurse Practitioner Practice
Optometry Practice
Physicians (Allopathic and Osteopathic)
Podiatric Practice


Additionally, the Agency has partnered with the following stakeholders to facilitate outreach efforts:
 
  • Regional Extension Centers
  • Florida Department of Health
  • Florida Hospital Association
  • Florida Medical Associations
  • Florida Osteopathic Medical Association
  • Florida Academy of Family Physicians
  • Florida Chiropractic Association
  • Florida Nurse Practitioner Network
  • Florida Dental Association
  • Florida Podiatric Medical Association
  • Florida Association of Homes and Services for the Aging
  • Clinical Laboratory Management Association (Florida Chapters)
  • Office of Rural Health/Rural Health Networks
  • Florida Council for Community Mental Health