CORHIO Meets Important Advanced Interoperability Milestone

Hundreds of community providers are now participating in the Colorado Advanced Interoperability Initiative to enhance care coordination and medical decision-making.

CORHIO is pleased to announce that an important milestone has been met in the Colorado Advanced Interoperability Initiative, with more than 500 providers participating in bidirectional exchange. A grant was awarded last year to Colorado Dept. of Health Policy & Financing from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). CORHIO, along with Quality Health Network on the western slope, were selected to provide health information exchange (HIE) services for the program. By enabling bidirectional data exchange, where participants both receive and submit data into the HIE, the program seeks to improve transitions of care between ambulatory providers, behavioral health, and long-term and post-acute care organizations.

Funded by this program, primary care physicians and other ambulatory providers are sending Continuity of Care Documents, or CCDs, via their electronic health record systems into the CORHIO HIE. These clinical documents are very valuable for referrals with specialists, behavioral health and long-term and post-acute care providers. Organizations reaching all the milestones for this program receive up to $3,000 in incentives. The program also includes consulting time with CORHIO’s Transformation Support Services team to support the data quality efforts related to CCDs.

Long-Term and Post-Acute Care Providers Clinical Document Exchange

The Colorado Advanced Interoperability Initiative program has enabled CORHIO to greatly increase the amount of clinical data from long-term and post-acute care providers in the health information exchange. This data enriches the community health records for patients, enabling their providers to see a more complete picture of medical history and recent encounters.

“We like to be ahead of the curve. Having the CORHIO records available with the hospital information has been a huge impact for us,” says Shanae Zion, Quality Assurance Support Supervisor at Professional Home Health. “It’s been really nice to get the information on our clients that come in and out of the hospital, find out what’s going on with them, and then being able to provide our information back.”

Participating long-term and post-acute care providers are sharing the Minimum Data Set (MDS) and Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) information they are already required to send to CMS through a tool that converts the data into CCDs. “For the most part, it was just taking what we already had existing and uploading it,” says Zion. “It was not inconvenient, it was extremely easy. Anybody should be able to get on board and make this happen.”

Behavioral Health Organizations Participating in Patient Consent Model

Also funded by the Colorado Advanced Interoperability Initiative, behavioral health organizations will be sharing patient information conforming to all privacy regulations via a patient-directed consent model. CORHIO is partnering with FEI Systems to integrate their consent module, known as Consent2Share, into our system. Working in partnership with the Mental Health Center of Denver, CORHIO will be pulling consolidated care documents into a separate repository, designed just for behavioral health data, to be queried by providers who have been granted permission by a patient to see their behavioral health data. This initial pilot project will then inform CORHIO’s work to expand to other behavioral health organizations. Additionally, CORHIO received a grant from the Rose Community Foundation to enhance patient outreach and education efforts so that patients can make an informed decision about their consent and the benefits to them for participation.