Governor Dannel Pl. Malloy announced that the State of Connecticut will receive a grant for $12.2 million to establish the state’s first statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) expected to be operational early 2019. The grant was awarded by CMS to the Connecticut Office of Health Strategy (OHS) https://portal.ct.gov/ohs.
“The HIE initiative is vital to the health of Connecticut residents, especially older adults with complex and multiple conditions and care needs”, said Department of Social Services Commissioner, Rod Bremby.
The HIE will enable providers to exchange clinical and diagnostic data in real-time, be a platform for measuring clinical quality, and be able to analyze population health. This is necessary to improve healthcare accessibility and correct racial, ethnic, and gender health inequities. Currently, analysts mostly use insurance claims data.
Connecticut’s Office of Health Information Technology in consultation with the statewide health IT Advisory Council is responsible for:
- Establishing and administering the State’s HIE, the All-Payer Claims Database
- Establishing and administering the Core Data Analytics Solution
- Developing and implementing the state-wide HIT plan and data standards
- Recommending policies, regulatory and legislative changes, and other initiatives to promote the state’s HIT and Exchange ideas
Allan Hackney, OHS Health Information Technology Officer said, “We engaged nearly 300 providers and consumers and 75 organizations across the health sector in the state to help us understand the issues and opportunities to improve care delivery and outcomes.”
The new grant to the state follows a $5 million grant received in 2017 to be used to facilitate HIE planning. To qualify for the additional resources needed, the state outlined how the health technology plan would improve disease management, serve the Medicaid population consisting of over 8,000 Connecticut residents, how to combat the opioid epidemic, and how the funding would improve overall healthcare through the use of clinical data.
Go to https://portal.ct.gov/OHS/Content/Office-of-Health-Information-Technology for information available on the Office of Health Information Technology.