The State of Connecticut will receive a $12.2 million grant to support ongoing work that will establish Connecticut’s first statewide health information exchange.
An earlier statewide HIE effort, the Connecticut Health Information Technology Exchange, was shut down in 2014 after spending $4.3 million in federal grant money over four years. A state auditor’s report noted that the exchange was never able to provide services to stakeholders and thus, never developed a self-sustaining revenue stream. (The State of Montana also recently decided to take a second try at creating a statewide HIE.)
The grant, awarded by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to the Connecticut Office of Health Strategy (OHS), supports efforts to develop a secure, modern HIE that facilitates the sharing of health data to further patient care, improve proper efficiency, and rein in the high cost of healthcare. The HIE is expected to be operational by early 2019.
The grant follows a $5 million federal investment the state received in 2017 that facilitated HIE planning. To qualify for the additional resources, states outlined how their health technology plan would improve disease management, serve the Medicaid population (over 800,000 Connecticut residents), combat the opioid epidemic, and improve overall healthcare through the use of clinical data.
The new round of funding launches a pilot program for the health information exchange, which was one of the nine recommendations made by the Health Information Technology Advisory Council, a statutory body tasked with a comprehensive examination of Connecticut’s current health technology needs.
“The health information exchange will improve care. Providers will be able to exchange clinical and diagnostic data in real time – efficiencies that will save time and resources for healthcare systems and patients,” said OHS Health Information Technology Officer Allan Hackney, in a prepared statement. “We engaged nearly 300 providers and consumers and 75 organizations across the health sector in Connecticut to help us understand the issues and opportunities for improving care delivery and outcomes. Technology can and should be a great partner in health reform.”
Another goal is for the HIE to enable a platform for measuring clinical quality and more quickly analyzing population health – one of the keys to improving healthcare accessibility and correcting racial, ethnic, and gender health inequities. Currently, analysts most commonly use insurance claims data, which is only a proxy for real-time clinical information. This use of the HIE dovetails with the work of OHS’s State Innovation Model Office and the Health Systems Planning Unit in their efforts to better address gaps in healthcare, improve community health, and evaluate the performance of Connecticut’s healthcare providers.
