"E-health saved a life tonight"

That message – which a Vanderbilt University doctor sent to a Memphis colleague – sums up the value of that city's digital information-sharing program.

In 2009 a woman was admitted to Saint Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee with a bleeding uterus. According to one report, “…because of the city's digital information-sharing program—a rarity among U.S. hospitals with different owners—the doctors learned that an ultrasound done days earlier at another facility had detected that the woman had an ectopic pregnancy.” As a result, “This knowledge prompted the Saint Francis doctors to rush the woman into surgery.”

This 2009 incident was used to highlight the value of hospital information sharing in a recent study conducted by Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University researchers and published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. According to the Vanderbilt study,

“The researchers found that the participating hospitals reduced health-care costs by $2 million over 13 months, largely because doctors avoided needless admissions, CT scans, and other tests after getting insights from the patients' medical histories. In other hospitals, emergency doctors often fly blind and overtreat or overtest incoming patients.”

According to the study’s author, “the saving was a tiny fraction of what could be achieved in Memphis alone, especially if every doctor's office was also linked to health-information exchanges.”

Health IT Saves a Life in Memphis (Technology Review, Nov. 15, 2011)

The financial impact of health information exchange on emergency department care (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Nov. 4, 2011)