Health IT can enhance patient care when properly designed, according to Dr. Neal Patel, Chief Informatics Officer at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.

Dr. Patel was the keynote speaker at the Central Illinois Health Information Exchange (CIHIE) Summit: Patient Care and Connectivity, a medical conference held in East Peoria on Sept. 21.

“Much of the care that women receive is not consistent with best evidence, despite the unprecedented body of comparative effectiveness research that is available to us in the field of maternity care,” said Maureen Corry, MPH, Executive Director of Childbirth Connection at Quality Quest’s annual board social held August 10 at Lakeview Museum.

Data may actually be entered into the Central Illinois Health Information Exchange (CIHIE) in October. Volunteers gathered to honor the remarkable progress at the CIHIE annual meeting July 12.

All participating CIHIE providers have their own data systems, which will be integrated to a secure central system. Informatics Corporation of America (ICA) is the technology partner that will supply the infrastructure to aggregate all the data required to populate a patient's chart.

Methodist Medical Center's IT team hashed out preliminary plans with ICA representatives on Tuesday. ICA met with OSF Saint Francis the day before and will soon meet with Proctor Hospital, covering the three major hospitals of Peoria. They will meet with other charter member organizations in Bloomington and Decatur the rest of the week.

The story of Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818 – 1865) has come to personify the struggle of advancing evidence on a medical community set in its ways.