The Massachusetts eHealth Institute (MeHI) http://mehi.masstech.org, the state’s entity for healthcare innovation, technology, and competitiveness at Mass Tech, has awarded nearly $200,000 to four qualified EHR vendors.
The vendors are to build efficient pathways for Massachusetts behavioral health providers to electronically submit reportable data to the Commonwealth’s Children’s Behavioral Health Initiative (CBHI).
The CBHI system is a court-mandated program that requires clinicians providing behavioral health services to children under the age of 21 to submit critical patient data so the state can accurately assess the needs of this patient population.
The grant funding enables the vendors to build new electronic interfaces to connect to 12 Massachusetts behavioral health providers. This will allow providers to efficiently submit CBHI reports and replace the manual process that was used to submit reports for the roughly 40,000 reports submitted to the Commonwealth annually.
The grant program stemmed from stakeholder meetings sponsored by MeHI which identified inefficiencies in the work flows at behavioral health providers and recognized the role that technology can play in alleviating the issue.
Based on that input, MeHI developed and launched a RFP in October 2016 seeking EHR vendors to work with Massachusetts behavioral health providers to develop a new “Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths” (CANS) HL7 interface
The objective is to be able to extract the CANS data from an organization’s EHR system, compile the data according to program specifications, and then automatically submit the data to the Commonwealth’s CBHI CANS system via the Mass HiWay.
After reviewing the proposals, MeHI awarded grants totaling $193,000 to four EHR companies to support the development and installation of the interfaces at 12 behavioral health organizations across Massachusetts. The grants went to eHana ($54,000) www.ehana.com, Netsmart Technologies ($54,000) www.ntst.com, PsyTech Solutions ($31,000) www.psytechsolutions.net, and Qualifacts Systems ($54,000) http://qualifacts.com.