Statewide Encounter Alerts Service (SEAS)

Know the moment your patient has a hospital encounter — anywhere in New York State.

Statewide Encounter Alerting Services (SEAS) is a SHIN-NY service that notifies your care team in real time when one of your patients is admitted, discharged, or transferred at a hospital — even if that hospital is in a different part of the state than you are. SEAS is delivered by either HealtheConnections or Hixny on behalf of the SHIN-NY, and is available to all SHIN-NY participants regardless of primary QE. SEAS is also free of charge in most cases.

Hands of two different people fitting puzzle pieces together.

How SEAS can help your organization

When a patient shows up in an emergency department or is discharged from an inpatient stay, the window to act is short.
A timely notification lets your team follow up before a patient falls through the cracks.
SEAS is designed to put that notification in the right hands, fast.

Timely intervention

Care teams find out almost immediately when a patient is admitted or discharged, so post-discharge follow-up, medication reconciliation, and outreach can happen while they still matter.

Better transitions of care

Real-time encounter alerts support care coordination, help reduce avoidable readmissions, and strengthen chronic-disease management across the SHIN-NY.

No regional blind spots

In a regional health information network, a provider in one area historically wouldn’t hear about a patient’s visit to a hospital in another area. SEAS closes that gap by drawing on encounter data from across all six QE regions, so alerts follow your patient wherever care happens.

Built on a modern foundation

Because SEAS is built on shared statewide infrastructure, the same underlying mechanism that delivers encounter alerts today is positioned to deliver additional data services to participants over time as the SHIN-NY roadmap advances.

How SEAS works

SEAS turns a hospital event into a notification in the right provider’s hands in four steps:

  • A hospital encounter occurs. A hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) system generates an ADT (Admit, Discharge, or Transfer) message — the standard electronic signal that a patient has been admitted, discharged, or transferred.
  • The event enters the SHIN-NY. The hospital’s primary QE receives the ADT message from the EHR system and forwards it to the SHIN-NY’s statewide Encounter Gateway where it is aggregated with ADT message feeds from all six QEs and sent to SEAS providers.
  • The SEAS providers match and route. SEAS providers use the SHIN-NY statewide identity resolution technology and consent registry to determine which providers and QEs have a care relationship with the patient(s) who had the hospital encounter(s), even across regions.
  • The alert reaches your team. The notification is routed to providers anywhere in the state that have subscribed to SEAS and who have a legitimate care relationship with the patient, so the right people are informed at the point of care.

More than a raw notification

Basic alerting simply forwards a raw admit/discharge/transfer message to a general inbox. SEAS is designed to be something your team can act on, not just another message to interpret:

  • Routed to the right recipient — targeted to providers with an actual care relationship with the patient, rather than broadcast at the organization level
  • Consent-aware by design — patient consent preferences established within each region are honored, so alerts respect each patient’s directives
  • Built to reduce noise — the service is designed to deliver relevant, actionable encounter notifications rather than a high-volume, low-signal stream
  • Clinically richer over time — SEAS is being enhanced so that, for consented patients, alerts can carry clinical context such as discharge summaries and Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) — turning an admission or discharge “ping” into a notification with meaningful detail

Who SEAS is for

SEAS is intended for the care teams and organizations that benefit from knowing about their patients’ hospital encounters, including:

  • Primary care practices and care management teams coordinating follow-up after an ED visit or hospital stay
  • Health systems, clinics, and provider organizations managing transitions of care
  • Organizations accountable for population health, quality, and reducing avoidable readmissions

If your organization already participates in the SHIN-NY through a QE, your QE can help you get subscribed to SEAS via one of the two SEAS providers, HealtheConnections or Hixny!