Our Approach

An independent nonprofit can become your trusted partner.

We listen to healthcare providers and find solutions to their problems. We’re here to assist you as a nonprofit, independent, neutral entity to electronically exchange patient health information with other providers, inside and outside of your system to improve care coordination. Ohio’s healthcare leaders have a vested interest in making a statewide Health Information Exchange – CliniSync – viable for everyone who touches a patient’s care. These leaders govern and guide us as our founders, Board of Directors, CliniSync Advisory Council, and other committees that shape policies, procedures and strategies. We’ve created an array of services that solve problems you face on a daily basis in communicating with other providers, whether you’re a health system, hospital, practice, specialty, long-term care facility, lab, pharmacy, health plan, social service agency or other entity that touches patients.

We can make HIT easier for you 

Rapid transition isn’t easy for any of us, especially as health information technology (HIT) moves forward at an unprecedented pace in our industry. We know the medical community has been challenged over the past several years to switch from paper records to electronic health records (EHRs), to meet federal expectations that are constantly changing, and to move into an era of robust health information exchange with electronic health record systems that often are isolated and unable to communicate with one another. Our organization is named the Ohio Health Information Partnership, and our Health Information Exchange is CliniSync, but we’re not about brand recognition. We’re about making Ohio’s healthcare system work smoothly and seamlessly with interoperability for all, regardless of whether you’re located in a rural or urban area of the state.

Become part of the healthcare community within Ohio and across states. 

We will connect you to the CliniSync Community. The CliniSync Health Information Exchange now has 155hospitals committed, 151 live, and we anticipate most will be implemented by year-end. Already, thousands of physicians and practices are receiving lab results, radiology reports, and transcribed reports directly from hospitals. Not one hospital, but all hospitals within the CliniSync Community. We cross over Ohio’s borders into other states and are connecting with other Health Information Exchanges to broaden that reach nationally.

No facility gets left behind or forgotten in this community. 

But the integrated health network doesn’t end there. More than 400 long-term and post-acute care facilities – including hospice and home health — are connecting to the CliniSync HIE so they can receive summaries of care from hospitals, and we’re working on bidirectional exchange. We’ve launched the Community Health Record where a treating provider can view a longitudinal patient record to better care for that patient. That’s especially important to providing holistic, patient-centric care. And we’re further extending our reach to create a Medical Neighborhood Referral Infrastructure, where social service agencies can ensure patients have adequate housing, nutrition, and other services beyond their medical conditions.

Our Vision 

Our vision is for electronic healthcare information to be wrapped around the patient. It’s that simple.

Our Mission 

We are a nonprofit stakeholder-driven organization to improve the care, equity and health disparities for all Ohioans, regardless of demographic or socioeconomic status, by facilitating the exchange of health and other critical information among stakeholders in a private and secure manner.

Our Goals 

How will we get there? Below are the goals we think will move us towards our vision.

1. Expand CliniSync services to reach all members of the care continuum, such as long-term and post-acute care, hospice, home health, behavioral health, independent physicians, EMS personnel, pharmacies, dentists, optometrists, social service agencies and more.
2. Put patients first by providing treating providers access to a single, comprehensive community record of a patient’s encounters with other CliniSync hospitals and providers.
3. Promote interoperability among EHR systems so Ohio becomes a network of connected systems, especially in areas most in need of these resources and connectivity.
4. Integrate real-time patient health information into our providers’ existing workflows so electronic communications becomes easier and cost-efficient.
5. Continue to build a community of trust throughout the state and beyond by engaging more stakeholders.
6. Continue to assist providers in meeting and complying with federal requirements for Meaningful Use, quality reporting and audits.
7. Protect the privacy, security and integrity of accurate patient health information throughout the community.
8. Support solutions that align with State of Ohio initiatives, such as public health reporting and payment innovation.

Our Backstory 

We have a simple, successful story that gets better every day. We’re a nonprofit, independent, private organization that started up in 2009 with $43.8 million in federal HITECH grant funding from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. With the help of hundreds of healthcare professionals throughout Ohio, we created the Ohio Health Information Partnership. First, we assisted primary care physicians in the shift from paper files to electronic communications in their practices. Second, we created the infrastructure for a statewide Health Information Exchange where the medical community could electronically view and share patient health information. We named the HIE, CliniSync, which signifies Clinical data synchronization.

With a lean staff, we accomplished both goals. But certainly not alone. Our founders include major healthcare leaders such as the Ohio Hospital Association, Ohio State Medical Association and Ohio Osteopathic Association, who continue to hold seats on our Executive Board of Directors. That’s because we want to make sure that those who govern our organization have a vested interest in the future of health information technology and health care in Ohio. Committees that formed this organization had representatives from across the medical industry – physicians, clinicians, chief information officers, health attorneys, hospital leaders, state agencies and more.

At first, we worked with 6,000 plus primary care physicians to ensure that they adopted electronic health record systems and met federal requirements in an incentive program that rewarded them with financial payments from Medicare and Medicaid if they went electronic. We were first in the nation for the number of physicians we helped. Simultaneously, we created CliniSync and garnered the tremendous support of 150 hospitals across the state to participate in this exchange. Currently, we are serving more than 92 percent of Ohio’s 11.1 million residents and that number keeps growing. Today, we’re a financially sustainable organization that continues to expand our services and outreach daily. To learn more about CliniSync, email us at information@clinisync.org or call us at 614-664-2600.