This September marks the seven-year anniversary of the launch of NC*Notify, the event notification service of NC HealthConnex. The service provides admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) notifications to providers on the patients they choose to monitor.
Health care providers are often unaware when one of their patients has received care outside of their facility or EHR network. Being notified of these events, such as their patient being transitioned to other care facilities or presenting to an Emergency Department (ED), in a timely manner helps them not only support patients but also meet repayment incentive requirements.
Full participants in NC HealthConnex can use NC*Notify to get significant insights into patients’ health care activity from more than 140 participating hospitals in the state, plus encounter data from thousands of ambulatory care settings.
Since it began in 2018, NC*Notify has been helping patients in North Carolina by improving follow-up times and care coordination and reducing hospital readmissions. First reports of connected subscribers in early 2019 show there were 33 practices enrolled, representing 295 providers who were monitoring 70,583 patients. It has since grown to 234 subscribing organizations monitoring over 11 million patients.
* Patients Monitored does not refer to unique patients. One patient can be monitored by multiple organizations.
Milestones in NC*Notify's Journey
2020
NC HealthConnex goes live with real-time event notifications to participants through NC*Notify, giving them more detailed information about patient populations. These real-time notifications especially help community-based primary care providers, post-acute facilities, payers and value-based care organizations to provide critical follow-up after patients are admitted and discharged from the emergency department or inpatient hospital stays.
“Before NC*Notify, our method of monitoring patient activity was by calling around to local hospitals and local providers by telephone and email. Pushing notifications to the facility has provided a more holistic view of patient activity across a complex health care system."
– Behavioral Health Provider
2021
NC HealthConnex rolled out new notification features and updates in Version 4 of NC*Notify. Subscribers gained access to COVID-19 lab result alerts, allowing them to react to positive cases in a timelier manner. Other new alerts were added that year, including High Utilizer Alert for frequent visitors to the ED, Dental Alerts, Care Team Change Alerts, Diabetes Diagnosis Alerts and Chronic Care Management Alerts. Read more about the enhanced alerts available for NC*Notify.
“NC*Notify is critical as is the portal. ... When you’re in a downside risk model and you have very acute patients this process is absolutely critical to the successful healthcare improvement, or management, of these acutely ill patients and their outcomes. It's improving performance all around and giving our patients just a better care experience.”
– Terri Roberts, Senior Practice Consultant/Statewide Quality Improvement Manager, NC AHEC
2023
Six maternal health care facilities participating in the ACURE4Moms study went live to receive Maternal Health Alerts powered by NC*Notify. The ACURE4Moms study seeks to improve health outcomes for Black mothers and infants by addressing systemic bias in health care processes. The Maternal Early Warning System generates alerts with information available through NC HealthConnex when a patient has a risk factor for low birthweight, including any physical, mental or social risk factors related to the study.
Cary Medical Management utilized the data within NC HealthConnex and alerts with NC*Notify to achieve an average cost savings of 21.75% for one of their facilities. This is compared to the national average of 5.6%, according to a 2018 report, for other providers with value-based care programs.
“Last year, we did a study looking at all the cases that we did using ADT notifications through NC*Notify and discharge summaries available in NC HealthConnex, and we found that our readmission rate was half of the national average…We saved around $1 million. This is one application of the HIE that had immediate impact and was easy to measure.”
– Dr. Siu Tong, CEO, Cary Medical Management
2024
With the launch of Tailored Care Management, NC*Notify provides alerts to help care managers meet follow-up parameters in a timelier manner.\
2025
One facility under Cary Medical Management reported readmission rates for the first quarter of 2025 at 9.2%, well below national average of 17.8% for Medicare patients according to a 2024 study on reducing hospital readmissions. CMM credits their success to receiving alerts from NC*Notify when their patients visit the ED.