The California Office of Health Information Integrity (CalOHII) released a Request for Applications (RFA) on August 29th for their “HIE Personal Health Records Pilot Project 2013”. The RFA seeks applications from qualified entities to participate in a five month electronic personal health record pilot project. Currently nothing exists to help providers evaluate the trustworthiness of Personal Health Records (PHR) when care is delivered.
This pilot will help establish policies and procedures to identify use cases and specific conditions to provide trusted exchange when sending data to PHRs. The pilot will also develop a roadmap on how to proceed to develop a trusted mechanism that will enable the use of PHRs across multiple states.
To begin the pilot activities, pilot participants will be required to initiate start-up tasks, meet with CalOHII no less than biweekly, and provide recommendations and input on draft policies plus recommendations on technical and governance issues.
The participants will need to explore use cases, data flows, and mechanisms that may enable bidirectional sharing. This will need to take place when the provider originates the data that will go to a PHR and the reverse when the PHR is sending the data to the provider. Also, document technical and security requirements need to be established for the PHRs used in the pilot.
The next step in implementing the pilot will require the participants take the lead in identifying one or several Health Information Service Providers (HISP) to take part in the pilot. Use cases describing a bi-directional pilot of data exchange involving a PHR will need to be considered under this pilot.
Qualified entities can include but are not limited to groups awarded federal grants or funds such as in the case with Beacon Community or Recovery Act Funds used to expand the use of health IT. Eligible entities should already be exchanging health information electronically and be engaging with providers that are interested in exchanging health information with their patients electronically.
Deadline for submitting questions is September 2, 2013. The RFA has a deadline of September 9, 2013 for submitting the RFA response. Approximately on September 13, 2013, the approved PHR Pilot Project applications will be announced with the grant amount is to be determined by CalOHII.
For more information, contact Kerry Cataline at 916-651-3364 or email Ifetayo Freeman at ifreeman@ohi.ca.gov, or call 916-532-7869. For more details on the RFA, go to www.ohi.ca.gov.