The Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing (DHCPF) www.colorado.gov/hcpf has completed their first Chronic Pain Disease Management Program. The program connects pain management specialists throughout the country with primary care providers to help Medicaid members www.colorado.gov/pacific/hcpf/colorado.medicaid in chronic pain.
The Chronic Pain Telehealth Program uses teleconferencing to connect with multi-disciplinary teams of chronic pain specialists including behavioral health professionals and pharmacists. The specialists review client cases to learn about evidence-based interventions to treat clients with complex conditions.
In addition, DHCPF has added the “Buprenorphine Telehealth Program”. This phase of the program connects primary care providers who are licensed to prescribe buprenorphine combination products with specialists to gain experience treating clients with opioid addiction.
The DHCPF also conducts a Pain Management Practice Transformation Learning Collaborative where physicians and clinic administrators plus a practice transformation coach work with an improvement team to implement best practices for treating chronic pain and opioid management issues.
In another development in the state, it was announced that twelve Colorado imaging centers are now connected to the Colorado Health Information Exchange www.corhio.org (CORHIO). CORHIO has signed a partnership to enable Health Images www.healthimages.com to send radiology results including MRIs, CT scans, X-rays, ultrasounds, and other diagnostic imaging tests to the state HIE.
Now that the connection to CORHIO is complete, Health Images radiology reports are available to providers through CORHIO’s portal which are used by emergency room physicians and office-based providers. Upon request to CORHIO, authorized network participants can have the radiology reports delivered into the providers EHR system.