NEWARK, NJ – A Web portal is helping to move patients out of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center’s emergency department and into health centers in the city.

The Web portal was a pilot project in Health-e-cITi-NJ, a health information exchange for the Greater Newark area, which aims to make it easier for providers, patients and hospitals to exchange information with the Newark Community Health Center and the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in Newark.

Newark Beth Israel, a 673-bed not for profit teaching hospital, was awarded a state grant to help divert patients from the ED to FQHCs for primary care treatment.

Tom Gregorio, vice president and CIO, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, said the hospital invested the $60,000 grant in a Web portal that would allow a patient’s ED case to be sent to the FQHC electronically instead of via fax.

“The day we went live we had a no-show and when we reviewed the record we found out the patient had been to the ED instead. The portal allowed us to follow up with that patient,” said Gregorio. This “immediately accomplished” what hospital officials had intended the Web portal to do, he said.

The portal is from Piscataway, N.J.- based IGI Health and uses Intel’s SOA Expressway for Healthcare to retrieve data for display from a variety of hospital systems including EHR, database, or HL7-based sources. The portal is unique, Gregorio said, in that it provides a patient’s Medicaid medication history such as dosing information and patient compliance. The portal is also plugged into the state immunization system and can pull information about a patient’s record sets.

“Whenever a patient comes into a physician’s office they are able to use the portal to enter patient demographics, and they need not have all immunization record sets of the patient available,” said Sita Kapoor, CIO, InfoTech Global.

Kapoor says the portal allows physicians to retrieve immunization records to help treat patients as well as send immunization records, “hence providing complete immunization record sets for any child that is going to be given any treatment no matter where they are in the country,” she says.

Newark Beth Israel is using Intel’s new version 2.2 SOA Expressway. Joshua Painter, senior architect at Intel, says the new version has three core improvements – it has better support for Windows, more reliable messaging and provides pre-built modules, workflows and predefined data maps that help to reduce the time of integration.