Coast Guard turns on InterSystems interoperability platform
InterSystems has announced that HealthShare, InterSystems’ integration and analytical products, has gone live within the US Coast Guard. The service will ensure that healthcare providers are able to gain access to records from multiple sources. Since 2012 the US Coast Guard has been transitioning its electronic health records to an Epic Systems setup.
Healthcare providers who treat U.S. Coast Guard personnel are now able to view longitudinal electronic health records pulled in from multiple sources, as the service has activated an interoperability platform, vendor InterSystems announced Tuesday.

“The interoperability piece is live,” Joe DeSantis, vice president for HealthShare at Cambridge, Mass.-based InterSystems, told MedCity News. HealthShare is the name of InterSystems’ integration and analytics products.

The Coast Guard has been transitioning from a hodgepodge of legacy technology to an Epic Systems EHR since 2012. “They need to initially connect their existing EHR systems to Epic,” DeSantis said.

InterSystems won a contract last year to provide the connection for what the Coast Guard calls the Integrated Health Information System, or IHiS. IHiS is replacing a variety of different installations of the Composite Health Care System, originally developed for the Military Health System.

Just two weeks ago, the Department of Defense awarded a $4.3 billion contract to Leidos, Accenture Federal and Cerner to replace its aging EHR, which includes elements of CHCS. The Epic and InterSystems installation is unrelated; the Coast Guard is not an official military branch, but rather part of the Department of Homeland Security,

However, DeSantis said that HealthShare will enable interoperability between Coast Guard records and those from outside sources, including the DoD and private healthcare providers. “We can talk to them via tried-and-true HL7,” he said, referring to Health Level Seven International communications protocols.

“Our information exchange is mostly plug-and-play,” DeSantis said.