The University of California Davis Institute for Population Health Improvement (IPHI) through their Health eQuality (CHeQ) program, has awarded grants for $775,000. CHeQ funded by the California Health and Human Services Agency, promotes coordinated and integrated care through HIE, promotes improved public health capacity for electronic reporting, and HIE acceleration funding opportunities.
The awards made through the CHeQ Rural HIE Incentive program are going to help four designated health information exchange providers in rural areas. Awardees include Redwood MedNet (Ukiah), Inland Empire HIE (Riverdale), Orange County Partnership Regional HIO, and Axesson (Santa Cruz). The 12 counties benefitting from this initiative are Colusa, Fresno, Humboldt, Kings, Madera, Mendocino, Napa, San Luis Obispo, Solano, Sonoma, Tulare, and Yolo.
As a result of the Rural HIE Incentive program, HIE options for exchanging information electronically have been created for more than 30 acute care and critical access hospitals, community clinics, and behavioral health providers, that now serve nearly 3.5 million rural Californians. More than 700 physicians in these counties will benefit with better access to patient information.
To further accelerate the adoption of health technology in California, the IPHI CHeQ program also awarded $400,000 to L.A. Care, the nation’s largest publicly operated health plan to develop Blue Button functionality to enable L.A Care members to access their own prescription data online. The project is the first in California and among the first in the nation to develop the tool for Medicaid beneficiaries.
To further increase the use of technology in the state, a Federal grant from HRSA’s Office for the Advancement of Telehealth for $750,000 was awarded to the University of California Davis Children’s Hospital at www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/children to help newborns in rural areas.
The funding was made available through the new “Pediatric Emergency Assistance to Newborns Using Telehealth” (PEANUT) program. The program will provide clinicians at rural hospitals round-the-clock access to neonatologists and other subspecialists through the use of UC Davis secure video conferencing capabilities.
Madan Dhamar, principal investigator for the PEANUT program reports that “Four hospitals in the state were selected to launch the project because these hospitals are located in rural counties serving health professional shortage and medically underserved areas.”
Rural doctors and hospitals deliver great care, but have limited access to pediatric subspecialists. Without subspecialty guidance, newborn infants may be undertreated, receive inappropriate therapies, or face unnecessary transfers.
As Dhamar added, “Now it will be possible by increasing access to pediatric cardiologists to help rural hospitals follow new guidelines for identifying infants with congenital heart disease and also help to avoid unnecessary neonatal transfers if physicians rules out the condition in advance.
For more information, go to www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/iphi.