State Upgrading Health Technology

The “State Innovation Model (SIM) Operational Plan Update” for Oregon released August 1, 2014 shows that the state continues to plan for data integration, data collection, and data intake.

According to the Plan Update, progress has been ongoing in developing the Emergency Department Information Exchange (EDIE) in partnership with the Oregon Health Leadership Council, Oregon hospitals, and health systems.

The exchange alerts emergency department clinicians in real-time when a patient uses the emergency department services too many times and/or when treatment could be provided elsewhere. These real-time alerts reduce duplicative services and assist clinicians in directing high utilizers of the emergency department to the right care setting. Oregon expects 37 of 59 hospitals to go live on EDIE by the end of summer with the remaining hospitals expected to go live by the end of the year.

The EDIE Governance and Operations Committee meets frequently and recently gained approval from the health leadership council and Coordinated Care Organizations (CCO) for a proposed financing strategy to support ongoing costs and the expansion of EDIE through a shared utility model.

In addition, CareAccord www.careaccord.org Oregon’s statewide HIE operated by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) www.oregon.gov/OHA is expanding by including Direct secure messaging. The plan is to develop a pilot program for a statewide Flat File HIE provider directory. The Flat File directory will enable organizations participating in DirectTrust to have access to the addresses of other Direct messaging users.

In another move, there are plans to contract with a systems integrator agent to ensure that the multiple Medicaid HIT efforts being designed and implemented, will be managed as an integrated interoperable system of systems.

OHA has determined that using a systems integrator agent to manage the procurement, design, development, implementation, and operations of the project is the best strategy to ensure successful implementation while meeting proposed timelines and budgets.

OHA is also looking to partner with the Office of Rural Health (ORH) at Oregon Health & Sciences University www.oshu.edu to administer the state’s SIM-funded telehealth pilots. The program will fund three to five telehealth projects with grants. In other award news, ORH has also provided $78,000 in grants to four Critical Access Hospitals and $99,000 in grants to 15 rural clinics across the state.

The plan is to support community paramedics in the state with tools such as tablets and triage software plus mobile devices to send text messages to help people manage diabetes, help with prenatal care, plus support other health issues.

Oregon continues to support the spread of the coordinated care model. Oregon’s health system transformation effort is based on a model of coordinated care that includes new methods for care coordination, accountability for performance, and new models of payment based on outcomes and health.

Also, OHA has been working on implementing a state-level clinical quality metrics registry. So far, CCOs have completed technology plans outlining how they will do electronic reporting of clinical quality data for three CCO incentive measures to include depression screening, and for diabetes and hypertension control.

So far, 16 CCOs have submitted sample data to OHA for all three measures. The data collected will support quality reporting and the development of pay-for-performance methods while building additional capacity for electronic reporting of clinical quality measure data.

Go to www.oregon.gov/Pages/index.aspx#search?q=SIM%20operational%20plan%20Update to view the SIM Operational Plan Update.