According to the summer issue “e-Health Update”, published by Maryland’s Chesapeake Regional Information System for Our Patients (CRISP), www.crisphealth.org, CRISP has been reporting services to all hospitals in Maryland through a web portal.
CRISP in partnership with CMS operates an all-payer hospital rate regulation system. Under the new model, Maryland hospitals will work towards reducing hospital readmission rates, reduce acquired conditions, and provide a performance report for various population health measures. With the new Medicare waiver, targeted to both control costs and to improve quality, CRISP Reporting Services (CRS) is being used within all Maryland hospitals.
The Health Services Cost Review Commission recently awarded $2.5 million to eight groups for the development of Regional Partnerships for Health System Transformation to support Maryland’s new all-payer model. The goal is to identify and address their regional health needs and priorities.
CRISP will supply the Regional Partnerships with healthcare data they can use to determine and address the region’s health concerns. The data will be used to provide interactive reports for each regional partnership to analyze various utilization metrics and to develop additional metrics and reports.
The State’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP)http://bha.dhmh.maryland.gov/pdmp collects and securely stores information on drugs containing controlled substances and drugs that are dispensed to patients in the state.
Drug dispensers, including pharmacies and healthcare practitioners, electronically report on the information stored in the PDMP database. Use of prescription information improves the ability to manage the benefits and risk of controlled substance medications and can identify potentially harmful drug interactions.
The PDMP also assists agencies responsible for ensuring public health and safety through the investigation of illegal or inappropriate prescribing and dispensing of prescription drugs. The Maryland PDMP is available to clinical users through CRISP but now a new critical user interface tab within the CRISP Clinical Query Portal called “Interstate PMPD” has been developed to enable providers to more easily view and analyze the data for clinical decision-making.
The news is that now Maryland will provide for out of state data access to PDMP with plans to begin with Virginia and then expand to other states. Maryland now connects to other state PDMPs through the PMP InterConnect (PMPi), an interstate data-sharing hub hosted by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy www.nabp.net in conjunction with their IT partner Appriss www.appriss.com.