We're excited you're here for the Civitas Networks for Health 2022 Annual Conference, a Collaboration with the DirectTrust Summit! Our four-day conference features nationally recognized health care thought leaders and brings together peers from across the country to connect, share experiences and learn – together.
This year's theme is "Better Together: Health Data Collaboratives and Information Exchange to Advance Health Equity", and we hope you find new information and actionable takeaways for implementation in your own communities. If you need assistance, reach out to contact@civitasforhealth.org.
We are planning pre-conference “Unconference” sessions prior to the Welcome Reception on Sunday, August 21! These sessions are designed to be collaborative and connecting, and will be open to all in-person attendees. Join us, roll up your sleeves and participate in engaging discussion on hot topics.
Interested participants will discuss the importance of multistakeholder collaboration, how to engage diverse stakeholders in governance, decision making and key initiatives. We hope to uncover emerging models to further this critical approach to health improvement while maintaining trusted, neutral community tables.
Technology and standards are a significant contribution to the foundation of our member organizations and the industry as a whole. This session could address topics such as FHIR, the Direct Standard™, CCDA standardization, USCDI correlation, evolving standards, data integrity, and related topics.
With changes in case law there is a growing interest in assuring the privacy and security of interoperable sexual, gender and reproductive health data. This session will invite participants to explore legal, technical and operational issues related to the exchanging and securing this data, including the potential reidentification of data when included in HIPAA-deidentified data sets
This session is for individuals leading and supporting their organization's marketing and social media. We hope to share tips, tricks, best practices while also discussing barriers and ways in which we can bolster one another's efforts to lead to greater awareness and overall success.
The security and privacy landscape is continually evolving. This session could include conversation around the current cyber landscape, what threats to be aware of, addressing new or proposed privacy regulations or guidance, as well as sharing experiences and lessons learned.
There are many questions circulating about participation with TEFCA. Increasingly, the RCE is releasing more draft and final SOPs but there are still unknowns, including which organizations will become QHINs and how this will change the nationwide interoperability landscape. This session will be a place to bring questions, seek guidance, clarify assumptions and further our collective understanding of how TEFCA will impact the work of our members and the industry at large.
Craig Konnoth, University of Virginia
Muhammad Chebli, NextGen
Sponsored by PointClickCare
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Lisa Bari and Scott Stuewe will welcome the attendees and thank the many contributors that make the conference possible. They will share the latest news about Civitas and DirectTrust, as well as their thoughts on the dynamic health care landscape and the ways in which a focus on health equity can sharpen our collective mission. They will highlight some of the opportunities and challenges organizational growth and changes in the environment present, including asking the audience to reexamine the roles each of us play and to rediscover what those around us are doing. Additionally, they will highlight various topics and activities not to be missed at this year's conference.
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Health data exchange and regional health improvement collaborative leaders across the country have tremendous opportunity to advance health equity through community-centric, data-led, multi-stakeholder and cross-sector efforts. In this keynote, Dr. Rishi Manchanda will help define this moment and this opportunity for Civitas members and partners. By outlining what it means to apply a structural lens to health equity work, Dr. Manchanda will highlight concrete opportunities for local health collaboratives and exchanges to advance health equity and describe how regional health improvement collaboratives and health information exchanges can help build the nation's "equity infrastructure." Join us to discuss ways we can seize this moment to advance health and transform the social and structural drivers of health equity in our communities.
Sponsored by Healthix
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
For decades, health care in the U.S. has been characterized by racial and ethnic disparities in care. Across nearly every medical condition, persons of color experience poorer outcomes, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status. Data is key to further understanding and addressing health disparities, but achieving health equity will take more than merely collecting data on patients.
Providing patients with their own medical data is a promising way to break down trust barriers, enabling them to become active participants in their own care and empowering them to contribute data to improve the health of others like them, in their communities and across the country. Patient data access helps level the playing field, allowing patient to control their own records regardless of where they live and where they receive treatment.
For example, Invitae’s Ciitizen platform has been working with Black breast cancer patient advocates to increase awareness of, and enrollment in, clinical trials. When patients have all of their data, they can more easily find clinical trials for which they may be eligible. But getting this data to patients can be a challenge.
HIEs are a natural place to enable the flow of medical records to patients, as they have already aggregated data on each patient from across the community or state. In this discussion we will have several HIEs discuss their process for enabling patient access to data, and what effects they have seen or hope to see from the process on how patients can be empowered with their data, including using the data to help reduce disparities in care.
Download SlidesSponsored by Contexture
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
During this keynote fireside chat, Dr. Dora Hughes and Dr. Cara James will discuss the critical importance of health equity data collection. This moderated discussion with two national health equity experts will focus on the state of sociodemographic data collection, challenges to such data collection and current and forthcoming initiatives to expand access and use of sociodemographic data within the public and private sectors.
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Expanded connectivity between immunization information systems (IISs) and HIEs can provide numerous public health benefits, including enhanced public health reporting and improved data to inform public health decision-making.
ONC, ASTHO and partner organizations will discuss lessons learned from previous and ongoing efforts to build and expand IIS and HIE data sharing, policy and practice considerations informing this work, as well as emerging insights from the field. Panelists will spotlight current activities and status of ONC’s COVID-19 Immunization Data Exchange and Advancement and Sharing (IDEAS) initiative, which aims to advance cross-sector partnerships and support sustainability strategies for IIS and HIE data sharing and integration. We will also discuss ONC-led and supported projects such as USCDI+ and the HL7 Helios FHIR Accelerator for Public Health.
Download SlidesRoom 2 (Salon G/M)
Attendees will learn the importance of an accurate, complete, and navigable directory for digital end-points and why DirectTrust has undertaken this improvement project. At the same time speakers will place the DirectTrust Directory in the larger context of the potential for a national provider directory. Presenters will provide overview of work completed and improvements to the Directory content validation and searching, demonstrate components of the new reference implementation, as well as provide glimpses of new work focused on making human services endpoints discoverable by providers using the directory.
The expansion of the DirectTrust Aggregated Directory to include human services and community based organizations along with developing standards for human services referrals has the potential to open up communications directly between providers and these organizations, eliminating friction and enabling near-real-time closed loop referral communication.
Download SlidesRoom 3 (Pearl 3)
In this presentation, speakers will introduce and illustrate the best practices and lessons learned from an evolving social care network. The presentation will include insights from a Midwest social care network that involves multiple, dynamic partnerships including community stakeholders, community-based organizations, a 2-1-1 Coordination Center, a health information exchange and a technology partner.
The intent is to use the experience of building a network through a strengths-based approach, to show how social care, by focusing on key partnerships, can impact health equity. Communities and stakeholders cannot improve health equity without intention, partnerships and ongoing reflection, to ensure the development of a tangible roadmap that encompasses system and individual-level applications, that offer opportunities to address root causes of health disparities.
Sponsored by Healthix
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
This panel will address next steps and share their experience implementing the Event Notifications via Direct standard, an effort spanning the industry that recently earned American National Standard status, including how implementation of a national standard for ADT Notifications can bridge health equity divides.
Room 3 (Pearl 3)
Organizational best practices teach us that the Board of Directors should be key players in setting strategy. In this session, HIE and regional health improvement collaborative leaders will discuss the principles of Board organization to create strategically focused governance with health equity at the forefront. This conversation will include ideas and firsthand experiences with recommendations for addressing health equity through governance and collaboration with the Board to determine the objectives that best meet your stakeholders’ needs. The information in this session can also be used to better identify, understand and operationalize the strategic vision of your Board and gain their strong support for your organizational objectives.
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Room 2 (Salon G/M)
Join us for three different states perspectives on public health data modernization efforts in Alaska, North Dakota, and Texas. This breakout session highlights challenges and opportunities in this space from a public and private perspective. Data modernization for public health is fundamentally about creating healthier and better-informed communities by connecting people with information. As simple as that sounds, it is incredibly complex and requires an enormous effort ensuring that the correct technologies, processes and policies are in place. The pandemic put a spotlight on the antiquated public health infrastructures at the federal and local levels which fortunately led to funding with the CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative (DMI). As a part of DMI, states have completed assessments of the current state of health information systems, data analytic tools and assessing the proficiency and capacity of current staff regarding DMI topics. From this assessment and engagement with stakeholders, states and communities have learned that many sections within state government are siloed with their data processing, sharing and reporting, but are enthusiastic about DMI. This opens the door to several opportunities for public private partnerships with entities such as health information exchange and increasing data sharing, accessibility, and governance in state government with the goal of building partnerships to support health and wellness and ensure health equity.
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
To advance a proper vision of health equity, decision makers must have access to transparent, reliable, and publicly reported information that will inform community and stakeholder engagement and strategy development.
During this panel presentation, we will hear from Civitas Members representing their communities and organizations who have been working to successfully deploy an equity strategy, including engagement with the c-suite, staff and people they serve.
Panelists will address important questions such as:
• How do we respond to the gaps in databases that were highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic?
• And how does this impact work at the state, multistate and national levels?
Any effort to understand health equity must start with prioritizing health data integrity, the cornerstone to measuring quality and to identifying the existence and magnitude of inequities.
The burgeoning toll of COVID-19 is proof of this, when it comes to information we can trust, the stakes could not be higher. Such information is critical to rectifying the injustices built into all U.S. institutions, including our health system. To move forward, we must persevere to bridge the information gaps.
Room 2 (Salon G/M)
Within the State of Texas, great variations exist in key health metrics such as health status, cost, price, utilization, access and quality. Variances by geographic region are evident, as are discrepancies among payor populations such as Medicare, Medicaid and Commercial.
Visual demonstration of such variations prompts key stakeholders to question the contributors of such inequities. In this session, we will review our recent project which created a publicly available website to report and display vital information, resulting in statewide partnerships and opportunities to support health equity initiatives and the need to incorporate social determinants of health information.
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Room 3 (Pearl 3)
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the lack of a standard framework to share basic healthcare situational awareness information. With funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s Strengthening the Technical Advancement & Readiness of Public Health via Health Information Exchange Program (The STAR HIE Program), the Texas Health Services Authority (THSA), HASA (a regional HIE covering multiple regions in Texas), the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), ESRI (GIS Mapping company), two local hospital partners, and Audacious Inquiry (technology partner) are working together to improve automated, real-time transmission of hospital capacity data among health care, critical infrastructure, and government response authorities in the state of Texas.
The Situational Awareness for Novel Epidemic Response (SANER) Project is an industry-wide, open-source collaboration to use modern health IT standards to simplify and automate reporting of hospital capacity and other situational awareness data during COVID-19 and beyond. SANER aims to revolutionize outdated and unreliable data-sharing processes through application programming interfaces (APIs) using HL7® Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®). The SANER Project’s goal is to improve real-time situational awareness of health care system capacity and resources like ventilators and ICU capacity during health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The session speakers reveal how Texas is building from the standards development efforts of the SANER Project to automatically extract hospital capacity data from two local hospital partners, develop a standardized measure report, and share easily consumable data with state and local health departments and HIEs. Under the STAR HIE Program, the partners are also developing a sustainability plan with the goal of statewide connectivity in future years. In addition to its immediate value for the COVID-19 response, automated electronic reporting will have widespread benefits for health care situational awareness in future disasters.
Download SlidesCraig Konnoth, University of Virginia
Muhammad Chebli, NextGen
Sponsored by Updox
Sponsored by InterSystems
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
On day two, Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT, Steve Posnack will provide an A to Z update on ONC’s portfolio with a specific emphasis on health equity. In particular, ONC’s approach to this priority area and where opportunities exist for health information networks and supportive interoperability infrastructure.
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Representatives from the ONC and four HIEs engaged in ONC’s STAR HIE grant program will discuss their work promoting health equity both as part of the nation’s COVID-19 response and broader efforts to address social determinants of health.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the significant inequities in access to health care resources throughout the United States. While we now seem to be on the other side of the pandemic, those inequities remain with us and represent the next major opportunity for HIEs to shine and be part of the national health IT infrastructure for measuring and monitoring health equity. HIEs are uniquely positioned to address such large social goals by activating data at both population and individual levels.
The panel will start with a discussion of the STAR HIE program funded by ONC and how issues of health equity were reflected in HIEs’ responses to the pandemic in their local geographies. This led to the formation of ONC’s Health Equity Workgroup, a subgroup of HIEs actively working on projects aimed at reducing inequity in their communities. We will summarize current ONC initiatives in this area and how they align with priorities at HHS and CMS, then move on to discussing how HIEs enable public health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic and where barriers to data sharing still exist. Each of our HIE presenters will discuss other programs aimed at influencing the health trajectory of marginalized groups or populations disproportionately affected by chronic illness, including racial minorities, low-income residents and the unique challenges of maternal health.
As more care is delivered in non-traditional care settings, equal access to care is increasingly reliant on equal access to technology, including the IT infrastructure and broadband capabilities that keep us all connected. We will discuss the roles of community outreach and activation in ensuring the equitable distribution of resources in rural and lower income urban areas.
Finally, we will visit some of the persistent challenges limiting our vision for health IT interoperability and actions we can take nationally and locally to influence the evolution of our field over the next decade.
Download SlidesRoom 2 (Salon G/M)
Equity is at the heart of high-quality health care, and today, too many health care organizations are still facing profound data challenges. HIE participants need support, resources, and tools to accelerate progress in addressing the health disparities that exist within the populations that they serve. Drawing on the Wisconsin Statewide Health Information Network’s real-life experiences with NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation (DAV) program, this session will provide strategies to connect HIEs with participants’ equity efforts.
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Room 3 (Pearl 3)
The inability to correctly identify or match patients today is a key barrier to interoperability and health equity efforts. Various efforts are underway to address this problem broadly, such as the CARIN Alliance Pilot and Patient ID Now, as well as standards development efforts like PEHRLS Ecosystem. This session will address the current state of patient identity and matching and discuss how organizations can get involved in next steps to gain traction on this issue.
Sponsored by MedAllies
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Future opportunities to participate in TEFCA are top of mind for members of the Civitas and DirectTrust communities. Recently, the RCE has released additional draft and final SOPs to define participation rules, but there are still many unknowns, including which organizations will become QHINs and how TEFCA will change the nationwide interoperability landscape. Additionally, there is important discussion about the role of state led and regional HIEs and HISPs in TEFCA. This session with experts in the field will aim to dispel myths, highlight important information, and discuss motivation for participation among stakeholders.
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Room 2 (Salon G/M)
The Central Ohio Pathways HUB and Unite Us have partnered on important work in the Ohio area, aiming to advance health equity by providing a shared data infrastructure to support community- based organizations employing community health workers. These employees will track referrals to services for their clients through our platform, thereby closing the loop and resulting in reimbursement from Medicaid for their work on behalf of vulnerable community members.
The Medicaid reimbursement is returned to the agencies, allowing them to continue the vital work they are providing. Join us to hear more about this partnership between Unite Us and The Central Ohio Pathways HUB, and how it offers a community level engagement strategy that works.
Download Slides2
Room 3 (Pearl 3)
To fight health inequities, we need deeper integration, more seamless transitions and faster interventions, all enabled by sharing, integrating and using health data in new ways and at scale. By combining administrative claims and clinical data and increasingly social determinants of health data, health plans, in partnership with HIEs, can gain better insights to address equity gaps, manage population health, improve quality for members, and more.
In this session, presenters will share how Health Plan of San Joaquin (HPSJ), a leading Medi-Cal health plan, focused on data-driven innovation and strategy, with the help of Manifest MedEx (MX), California’s leading nonprofit health data network and SameSky Health, a cultural experience company that removes barriers to care, to support its highest-risk and underserved members as California’s Covid-19 vaccination distribution began. Presenters will highlight success and provide updates on where efforts are now two years later.
Sponsored by Secure Exchange Solutions
TEFCA QHIN Lunch Meet Up
Join the speakers from the TEFCA panel including leaders from The Sequoia Project for an informal discussion following their breakout session. This will be a place to bring questions and to connect with peers on this important topic.
Grab your lunch and meet in conference rooms 1-4.
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Healthcare technology and infrastructure continues to become more advanced, but the uptake of these advancements sometimes seems to lag. After placing significant emphasis on technology pipelines and making things happen, we now face a different problem -- education. Care teams often don’t know what they do or don’t have, or even what’s out there that can help better take care of patients and drive health equity. Join this panel as they discuss and share where they’ve found success in technology education, as well as where they see ideas and opportunities for how attendees and their organizations might advance their own education campaigns.
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
American Indian communities in Arizona face significant health disparities, including high rates of diabetes, which are compounded by lack of available data to track outcomes. To address this problem, Arizona’s Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), partnered with Arizona’s health information exchange, Contexture, to incentivize providers to exchange data with the HIE to be used to improve clinical quality measures for its American Indian Health Program (AIHP).
This session will present data and findings that demonstrate how AHCCCS used HIE data to measure diabetes control for its AIHP population and how the data can be used to enhance care coordination that improves health outcomes.
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Room 3 (Pearl 3)
Like many states, California is currently addressing historical injustices in its health and social services systems. The state is addressing these issues through efforts such as CalAIM, the state’s Medicaid transformation initiative, while also tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. These efforts require robust data sharing across organizations in the state.
Advancing health equity is one of the core guiding principles undergirding the Data Exchange Framework being developed for the state. The Framework will guide the state’s strategy and implementation for the data-sharing mandate that takes effect in 2023. In its drive to achieve health equity, California has taken a highly collaborative approach to developing the Data Exchange Framework that should serve as a model for other states–both in terms of the state’s stakeholder engagement process and recent industry collaborations.
In this session, representatives from state government, HIE and policy and advocacy groups will reveal how the recently released Data Exchange Framework and other recent policy developments and proposals in California will improve data sharing to advance health equity across the state and highlight the collaboration needed to achieve success.
Download SlidesRoom 2 (Salon G/M)
To improve data sharing while advancing health equity the Arkansas Statewide Health Information Exchange, (SHARE), Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), Arkansas Children’s Care Network (ACCN), a statewide pediatric clinically integrated network, Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS) came together to solve a statewide problem of data exchange of children taken into custody and put in foster care. There are ∼443 000 children in child protective custody (i.e., foster care) in the United States. According to the Arkansas Division of Children and Families (DCFS) monthly reports, as of August 2021 there were 4,842 children in the Arkansas foster care system. Children in protective custody have more medical, behavioral, and developmental problems that require health care services than the general population. These health problems are compounded by poor information exchange impeding care coordination and continuity of care. Health care providers often do not know which of their patients are in protective custody and are not privy to the critical social history collected by child protective services, including placement history and maltreatment history. This session will describe the process, its benefits, and address how the recommended steps for improved information sharing are evolving to include working with the PCPs and Academy of Pediatrics while following the initial goals of: 1) develop shared community vision, (2) determine shareable information components, (3) implement and analyze information sharing approaches, and (4) evaluate information sharing efforts.
Sponsored by MedAllies
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
With the increasing awareness and acceptance of the role that unmet social care needs plays on health outcomes, healthcare costs and resulting health inequities, a sense of urgency is unfolding that risks history repeating itself. Decades earlier the healthcare industry’s effort towards technology, in advance of standards that allow the data to move between systems or laws to govern that movement, closely mirrors the social referral systems proliferation we see today. Healthcare had to retroactively adapt systems to developing standards. Now that healthcare infrastructure is in place and standards bodies exist to support data exchange, we can move faster in social care. Stakeholder feedback across the nation is calling on HIE’s to unite the data and the work towards social and health care data integration. Using the lessons from past experiences while maintaining a focus of health equity, industry leaders will explore the real-world barriers to cross sector social care data interoperability and explore possible solutions allowing systems to emerge that impact health equity.
Room 2 (Salon G/M)
Supporting social needs is not only important for improving overall health and well-being of people and their communities, but also in promoting equity and reducing health disparities that are often rooted in social and economic disadvantages.
Facilitated by Stratis Health, community organizations, health care and payer organizations have come together to collaboratively design a shared approach that ensures health care, food, transportation, housing and jobs resources and supports are culturally responsive, readily available, and integrated.
In this session, we will review this work, which aims to co-create a sustainable shared solution for exchanging social needs resource referrals via supporting technology statewide between health care and community organizations and is community led, health system integrated and payer funded.
Download SlidesRoom 3 (Pearl 3)
This presentation will feature a collaboration between HEALTHeLINK (HeL) and Milbank Fund. They recently completed a study aimed to examine how the use of population health analytics can help CPC+ members reach their goals. The study showed that to improve quality and reduce costs, financial incentives and digital capabilities are needed. CPC+ provides the financial incentives, and HeL delivers the needed digital capabilities to achieve incentives.
This study highlights that HIEs can go beyond their initial purposes, become integrated with the rapidly changing health care market and claim a central role in the data-driven, digitally enhanced model health care delivery system.
The presentation will provide an overview of HeL, their efforts to diversify their services and their strategy to collaborate with CPC+ members.
The session will also address the logistics of this project calling attention to the importance of coordination and the groundwork required for the successful implementation of strategic goals. They will also discuss the role of Milbank Fund in designing and motivating the alliance as well as provide specific details of the research study.
Room 2 (Salon G/M)
The Paso del Norte Health Information Exchange (PHIX) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) that serves the El Paso, Texas region by providing healthcare IT technology and key services not otherwise attainable in rural regions. PHIX does this by using innovative in-house programming to create data exchanges, fulfill healthcare needs, and analytics for actionable data.
The use of EHR systems in combination with HIEs has allowed for patient medical record interoperability to serve community, state, and national health. However, in contrast to most HIE’s, PHIX aggressively pursues enabling the acceptance of data from one-of-a-kind EHRs since our region consists of many independent practices with a majority having less than 3 physicians. Moreover, the cost to create interfaces can be a major barrier in the expansion of interoperability. Therefore, PHIX leverages in house programing to onboard local practices so that they may avoid fees. Additionally, PHIX also leveraged custom programming to onboard 2 local hospitals at the peak of COVID-19 to support transitions of care when national efforts for interoperability were not focused on rural needs. This rapid data integration meant that all hospitals in El Paso, TX would be exchanging data and all of their patients could receive similar opportunities for clinicians to securely access their medical records.
PHIX also uses custom programs to meet community needs when there are no current healthcare solutions. During the pandemic El Paso did not have technology that would support COVID-19 lab ordering and within weeks PHIX created a system for ordering labs, resulting labs, and notifying patients of results. This trend continued with the creation of El Paso’s COVID-19 case investigation system, flu vaccination system, and state registry reporting. Through this work PHIX promoted the quality of public health within our region by creating IT infrastructure necessary to support urgent needs. This flexibility to grow allowed our region to keep pace with growing healthcare concerns. This includes the development of a trauma image sending system that allows rural areas of Texas to send emergency trauma images to local hospitals electronically. This system promotes positive health outcomes and decreases the gaps in care that exist today when trauma transfers send trauma images on CD disks not allowing physicians time to review radiology images prior to a patient’s arrival.
Furthermore, PHIX can utilize discrete data that exists today to help with the discovery of health disparities within our region and can help guide care decisions outside of our region. Notably PHIX has been engaged in a project to review an array of emergency department admission diagnoses and the correlation with the region. The goal was to see if map clusters exist around El Paso for admissions like diabetes type 2, strokes, cancer, and more. By reviewing these clusters healthcare leaders can focus future studies and grants to understand health disparity regions and guide where resources may be needed. On the other hand, PHIX is also contributing to a CDC study to promote better understanding on COVID-19 vaccine efficacy. This also provides increased ethnic representation when it comes to national studies seeing as El Paso is a largely Hispanic community on the Border of Mexico. Through these studies PHIX intends to promote equal representation of individuals locally and beyond.
Overall, as a non-profit PHIX has created greater health equity in our region by providing healthcare infrastructure to practices who would otherwise not have the means to do so and through contributing to the discovery of health disparities using healthcare data analytics.
Download SlidesRoom 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
The U.S. health care system currently struggles with how to close the divide between those with access to care and those without. Often that gap is a result of upstream health determinants such as access to safe housing, healthy food, and economic stability. HIEs offer a unique opportunity to provide data and a window into gaps that need to be closed. Join us as leaders from two HIEs: Healthix and Greater Houston HealthConnect, describe their work with state government, local community-based organizations and their provider community. This moderated session will discuss how HIE’s weave together important policy levers, local partnerships, and technology to incorporate social determinants data into providers workflow to close the health equity gap.
Room 3 (Pearl 3)
A Health Data Utility (HDU) serves the health data and analysis needs of its state—both the private sector and state government. There are many organizations across the country, including HIEs, that resemble the HDU model. This presentation by John Kansky, President & CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), and Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Chief Medical Officer of the Indiana Department of Health, will explore how their state is evolving as an aspirational statewide HDU.
The presenters will define HDU and provide several success stories that demonstrate how Indiana is using health data and health improvement activities to advance health equity. Examples include involvement in a multi-organization collaboration on a Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion project; creation of multiple dashboards to share important data related to the pandemic; and an initiative to connect underserved communities to address Indiana’s disparities.
They will discuss the challenges the state faces related to the HDU model and toward addressing health equity; and finally, they will share some of the opportunities and ideas that the state hopes to explore next.
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Michael C. Burgess represents the 26th District of Texas. After spending nearly three decades practicing medicine in North Texas, he has served the constituents of the 26th District since 2003 in the United States House of Representatives.
He currently serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, House Rules Committee, and House Budget Committee.
In the current 115th Congress, he is the most senior medical doctor, on both sides of the political aisle, serving in Congress. With his medical background, he has been a strong advocate for health care legislation aimed at reducing health care costs, improving choices, reforming liability laws to put the needs of patients first, and ensuring there are enough doctors in the public and private sector to care for America’s patients and veterans.
In 2016 he was the principle House majority author of the Health Information title of the 21st Century Cures Act including all provisions relating to information blocking, trusted exchange, and interoperability. Throughout his time in Congress he has been a leader in health care innovation and modernization and has been one of Civitas’ Congressional Champions supporting several of our priorities on Capitol Hill.
In this session Representative Burgess will provide an update from Washington DC and where he sees the Congress further engaging on issues surrounding health data, pandemic preparedness, privacy, public health surveillance and implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act.
Sponsored by TBA
Sponsored by NextGen
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
The Health Data Utility (HDU) concept and model is evolving. Increasingly, Civitas members are recognizing their critical role in combining, enhancing, and exchanging health data. Such members as CyncHealth have been functioning as an HDU for multiple years, using state policy levers, engaging broad stakeholder groups in participation and community engagement, maturing use cases with Medicaid and public health, creating equitable governance and committing to transparency all while maintaining high standards for data privacy and security. Jaime Bland, President and CEO will share insights about the HDU model and how this is serving the state of Nebraska. She also will moderate a discussion among three other Civitas members who are newer to HDU adoption and application. She also will moderate a discussion among three other Civitas members that represent different models of HDU adoption and application.
The statewide HIEs in Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont are each on the trajectory of operating as a Health Data Utility (HDU) for their respective states, having followed different paths with differing successes, challenges, opportunities and lessons learned along the way. The leaders of HealthInfoNet in Maine, Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), and Vermont Information Technology Leaders (VITL) - operators of their states’ HIEs - will share the experiences of their organizations on the path to partnering with their state governments, engaging multi-stakeholder groups in strategic planning and governance activities, developing broad-reaching connectivity and interoperability, delivering on statewide public health needs, advancing capabilities in support of Medicaid value-based purchasing programs and working toward models of sustainability.
Each HIE will share how operating as an HDU further supports their work to advance health equity in their respective states. Early successes among the HIEs include: providing data for use in evaluating disparities in health outcomes associated with race and ethnicity in order to effectively target improvement efforts; working to more accurately, sensitively, and consistently capture social care information such as social determinants of health and sexual orientation and gender identity information from provider participants; wellness and wellbeing; and provisioning essential data to support care delivery by providers who serve the state's most vulnerable individuals. Throughout these activities, each HIE is partnering closely with their states’ public health authorities, Medicaid agencies and other critical stakeholders in strategically planning the role that they – and their HIE data sources – may play in helping to advance health equity.
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Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
This roundtable discussion will present real world examples from states/regions including Idaho, Oklahoma and Washington DC, as well as a national perspective on how regional HIEs are spearheading community network collaboration and incorporating social needs tools and platforms (e.g., findhelp.org and UniteUs). The use of such vendors helps providers, patients and community-based organizations identify social needs and accelerate the delivery of social support services to improve health.
Room 2 (Salon G/M)
Discover how third-party validated data can open doors for your data strategy. More than a dozen Health Information Exchanges have gone through NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation program to validate clinical data streams for use in quality reporting and other quality programs. NCQA program lead Wendy Talbot will lead a roundtable discussion about the program, including the value the validation provides and real-world use of validated data. Panelists represent the perspectives of HIEs, Health IT organizations and payers that validated data through NCQA and are now using the data with their payer and contracting partners.
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Room 3 (Pearl 3)
Children in foster care and adults who are aged, blind and disabled are at a higher risk for not accessing physical and mental health services on a regular basis. Proper coordination of care between payers, providers and patients and virtual access to behavioral health services, improves patient outcomes. In this session, speakers will highlight efforts focused on the delivery of real-time hospital notifications to payer care teams, the ability to engage patients via text and expanded access to virtual behavioral health.
Sponsored by TBA
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Texas has a highly diverse of population and geography, and there many opportunities and requirements for community-led health initiatives. Across the state, several communities are leading efforts in building networks to support the use of social determinants of health (SDoH) data to improve local equity, wellness and growth. Despite differences and local variation, there are common needs and occasions to share and learn from each other. The SDoH Texas Workgroup is volunteer-led and convenes community leaders to share common goals and missions to enhance the sharing, protection, and utilization of SDoH data to promote population health. Across the group there is recognition in the foundational value of SDoH data to promoting health equity.
This session will focus on the SDoH Texas Workgroup, highlighting community efforts using SDoH data, as well as addressing key barriers and successes. The speakers will also share their future plans for increasing collaboration, advocating for SDoH policies and opportunities to partner with State Medicaid through Managed Care Organization services.
Room 1 (Salon H,I,J,K,L)
Lisa Bari and Scott Stuewe will again take the stage together to recap highlights of the week and to invite collaborative cross-pollination of our communities to tackle interoperability, identity, quality and care coordination with the goal of strengthen efforts to achieve health equity.
In 2019 HealtHIE Nevada, the statewide HIE began sending eCase Reports to the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) as part of a HITECH grant. In 2021 SNHD was awarded a CDC grant to improve health equities for COVID-19 positive patients. As part of that multi-year grant HealtHIE Nevada was again chosen to work with SNHD to improve the quality of data collected and sent to SNHD.
The project has four key goals:
1. Improving data quality for patient matching by enhancing the collection of cell phone numbers.
2. Enhancing the data quality of information collected from HIE clients specifically for race, ethnicity, and gender identification for the LGBTQ community.
3. Improving access to immunizations using automated queries to the state immunization registry.
4. Enrich and standardize the data reports sent to SNHD to prioritize serving our most vulnerable high-risk populations.
The presentation will describe the previous work completed and the new focus on health equities, the services being provided and the outcomes that are expected.
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We will never reach health equity if we don’t create solutions that are equitable to all of healthcare.
Doing less with more seems to be the way every provider must operate. Dealing with regulatory pressures, changes in reimbursement models, increasing patient loads and pandemic challenges all amidst a staffing shortage can feel like the house is on fire. It’s unreasonable to expect providers to apply focus to an eight-syllable word (interoperability) that is still not widely understood and expect them to execute on it.
With the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, the industry has certainly made strides in creating an infrastructure for exchange, but more than a decade and $30+B has gone by, and where has it gotten us? We still have 75% of the healthcare communication and exchange happening over fax – and in many cases a paper fax. Patients are still having to complete the same forms over and over again. Providers are still struggling to gain access to medical history before seeing their patient, let alone submit data to their HIE.
We have to think differently about how to create solutions for providers that are balanced, reasonable, and complementary to the clinical tasks/experiences at hand. While it may be easy to manage, easy to deploy, and check all the compliance boxes on the technology side, if the “solution” for the clinical end-users are a nightmare to use, we will continue with disparate systems and communication will continue to be fragmented, making the outcome of health equity difficult to attain.
Join us in a spirited and transparent conversation about how to drive technology adoption and unlock the true potential of interoperability and all it promises to deliver.
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The allegory of Stone Soup presents a lesson every HIE can learn from. Many of us know the classic story of hungry strangers who persuade the locals to contribute ingredients for a communal meal, which is often told as a lesson about group cooperation in times of scarcity. It’s a tale made for HIEs—a celebration for which the ingredient to acquiring scarce resources is community. The lesson is in getting community stakeholders to contribute funding, time, and data when none seem available.
Like the hungry strangers of the story, HIEs have opportunities to help exchange members link current community resources with individuals’ social needs, ultimately resulting in improved community health.
This session will offer real-world scenarios for planning, governance, and convincing stakeholders to fund the blending of community information exchanges (CIEs), 211 services, and community-based programs with HIEs to create an extremely valuable Community-based Data Asset (the soup) to benefit all stakeholders in a given geography.
This panel will provide a framework inclusive of all kinds of data and services combined with stakeholder support and governance—all with the concept of a truly local Community-based Data Utility model. Hear from diverse perspectives representing HIEs, board members, and legal counsel as they:
• Review successful Community-based Data Utility models in specific communities
• Discuss new efforts toward building buy-in from healthcare leaders and State Agencies
• Offer ideas on how to engage HIE boards, payers, providers, and state agencies to resource these efforts
• Identify federal legislation and funding for Community-based Data Utilities and Community-based Data Assets
• Provide strategies to better identify, understand, and operationalize the strategic vision to build a common Community-based Data Asset
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COVID-19 placed significant strain on California’s disease surveillance systems and local public health departments, exposing gaps in both the timeliness and accuracy of reporting data that may have differentially exacerbated infection rates among diverse populations. To address this issue and prevent reoccurrence, California provided funds to public health departments to enhance infectious disease response capacity. The Santa Cruz Health Services Agency (HSA) Public Health Department has chosen to deepen its relationship with the county health information organization, Santa Cruz Health Information Organization (SCHIO), to best address disease surveillance management and response in alignment with community health equity goals. Santa Cruz epidemiologists are challenged with linking large, fractured data sets from state databases and disparate laboratory records to identify potential outbreaks within their community. Moreover, they must correlate these records to patient cases to conduct Case Investigation and Contract Tracing (CICT). SCHIO has stepped in to serve as a data intermediary, aggregating, organizing, and storing data based on public health use cases to reduce the department’s response time in providing this core disease control measure SCHIO and Santa Cruz HSA are developing additional ways for the HIO to serve an integral role in providing patient level information that is missing or conflicting in state, lab, vaccination, and other data systems, allowing Santa Cruz HSA CICT to expeditiously mitigate the spread of infectious diseases among county populations. This panel will address the benefits of public health department / HIO partnerships to meet community data needs and improve equitable health response through a focused examination of lessons learned in Santa Cruz.
Download SlidesThis study conducted qualitative interviews with multiple Direct Secure Messaging organizational leaders to obtain the barriers and facilitators from the perspective of senders (i.e., hospitals, EHR vendors, and HIEs) of Event Notification implementations (using the DirectTrust Standard™) to Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) (post-CMS-9115-F implementation).
In this presentation, the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) will share its strategy to improve health equity using EHR data and community partnerships within a quality improvement learning collaborative. Through a unique, statewide partnership, WCHQ is engaging with health systems and other stakeholders to set improvement goals and track health equity over time.
Wisconsin has been a national leader in improving health care quality. However, there are widespread disparities in health outcomes and care. The 2019 and 2020 WCHQ Wisconsin Health Disparities Reports identified health disparities by race and ethnicity, health insurance, and geography. Using the data from these reports, leaders from WCHQ member health systems selected priority measures for improvement.
When the priority measures were selected, WCHQ launched a quality improvement learning collaborative to address specific health disparities throughout the state. Eliminating health disparities is a task that cannot be done by health systems alone or accomplished in silos. WCHQ's Disparities Improvement Team includes representatives from health systems, community organizations, payers, and other stakeholders to collaboratively identify best practices and implement strategies to decrease health disparities and improve equity.
The evidence is clear that minority and underserved populations suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and experience worse outcomes with the care that they do receive. While most health care providers appreciate the impact that social determinants of health have on their patients, data highlighting social needs and measuring disparities are not consistently incorporated into quality improvement interventions or value-based care models. Barriers include the administrative burden of capturing and integrating the relevant data on a timely basis to enable the QI process, as well as stakeholder reluctance to share more comprehensive data sets that are needed to measure outcomes. A multi-stakeholder group of payers, providers, community-care hubs, and a Health Information Network (MiHIN) have launched a project that involves developing statewide collaborative quality improvement programs targeting key chronic diseases with an emphasis on addressing health disparities. We will highlight an approach to establish data sharing infrastructure to accelerate quality improvement, reduce provider burden, and incorporate a health equity focus into the QI process by leveraging the services of an HIE.
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Communities across California have implemented programs aimed at improving health and social outcomes of their most vulnerable residents by creating distributed care teams that collaborate across sectors to meet complex needs. Hear learnings from one community that launched a program using a distributed care team model supported by a care management platform and the exchange of actionable information. Understand how this program addressed systemic inequities, improved health, and reduced the social burden of high-risk individuals, resulting in the success of reducing chronic homelessness by 28% in two years. Learn how this community leveraged technology to coordinate and collaborate across sectors, creating shared care plans and unified goals for clients they serve. Understand emerging best practices, including what solutions they will enhance and what they will abandon as they launch into new phases of work.
Treatment in an emergency department (ED) is situational and consists of a short-term relationship between patient and provider. Those with unmanaged complex conditions frequently string together many of these visits as a makeshift care plan. Meanwhile, the providers who see them struggle with the repeated visits for the same reasons and being unable to adequately address the patient’s needs.
Organizations in Colorado are piloting the use of electronic medical records and claims data to identify these high-need, high-utilizers and track them as they move throughout the health care system. Employing claims data from the Colorado All Payer Claims Database (CO APCD), the Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) will generate a list of high-needs patients in the Denver metro area. This list will be transferred to the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO), one of the state health information exchanges (HIE), where an “Orange Flag” will be added to the records, visible to participating providers.
A provider, when seeing the flag, will be alerted that the patient is not currently enrolled in a coordinated care plan to adequately manage their needs. This will guide providers when they are working to support their patients, giving them additional information on which to base treatment recommendations. The flag will also afford real-time information about the high-needs population, supporting targeting interventions.
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To promote whole person care, the DC HIE maintains a flexible infrastructure for SDOH data-sharing through DC HIE direct entry tools, EHR integrations and via third party vendors. The District’s unique community-driven strategy enables the exchange of social determinants of health data through a vendor agnostic approach that allows for social needs screening, referral and resource information to flow through the DC HIE without requiring the use of a single District-wide platform.
Patient Care Intervention Center is developing the resource directory exchange for the Health Equity Collective in Greater Houston. The Health Equity Collective, a multi-sector effort focused on creating a more equitable health ecosystem representing over 180 organizations and more than 50 coalitions aligned with a shared mission to establish an impactful, sustainable, data-driven system to promote health equity and address the social drivers of health outcomes. A key effort of the Health Equity Collective is facilitating the development of Community Information Exchange using a federated model. This approach is linking existing technologies and cultivating interoperability across the ecosystem. The initial development is focused on the foundational resource directory exchange capacities, to improve information, access, and quality of resource directory data.
PCIC is developing this model to create a central hub for Houston’s multi-sectoral data sharing and synchronization of resource information. With existing connections to service providers in the community, state-wide and nationally, the focus of the work will be on interoperability between resource directories. The data structure standardization process includes mapping and analysis of database schemas, comparative analysis of the contents of the resource directory databases specifically around data structures and bringing resource directory exchange into alignment with both the Open Referral & AIRS standards. This is being implemented in along with a robust shared data governance process to facilitate multi-organizational data-sharing and cooperative workflows.
We will describe our process including
Phase I: Governance & Data Structure Standardization
Phase II: Resource API Engine and API SDK
Phase III: Deployment and Post Deployment Activities
COVID-19 has not only exposed the equity challenges faced by our communities, impacted by existing gaps in effective collaboration between agencies and our community members. The pandemic also exposed the need for trust building in and across communities, and in the health care system.
Download SlidesTo expand and maximize COVID-19 relief funds in our community for housing and homelessness, we collaborated with the metropolitan Omaha Health and Housing Coalition to design a roadmap for data sharing using the health data utilities of CyncHealth. CyncHealth, a data company, believes in data democratization, data driven decision making and data for public good. In this project, we worked with our partners to pave a way forward to advance health care equity by developing a community roadmap for a shared data infrastructure among health care, social services, and public health that. Through this project we aimed to center equity, meet communities’ self-determined needs, and supports systems change for community health and well-being.
Data can democratize and that is the philosophy of CyncHealth. However, data without community input on what is valuable and important lacks impact. Therefore, we developed a community-driven roadmap to identify data needs for community-based organizations through Omaha’s Health and Housing Coalition. This effort could potentially allow community organizations to enhance the work they do in the community. Our approach utilized a participatory evaluation approach to build a meaningful data intermediary process in partnership with the community. We followed the 10 Principles for Trustworthiness for community engagement outlined by the American Association for Medical Colleges treating the community as the experts in a community-driven, diverse and transparent approach to understands and deliver housing SDOH data. The goal of these efforts was to advance public health solutions that take into consideration healthy equity and the social determinants of health.
The HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) standard is being leveraged in several areas of healthcare to increase interoperability. Several HL7 FHIR Accelerators are focused on creating functional use cases to improve data exchange including the exchange of social determinants of health (SDOH). While these functional use cases are critical, building the infrastructure necessary for these use cases to be implemented in a scalable way is imperative.
This session will educate attendees on the work of the FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST), one of the newer HL7 Accelerators and formerly an ONC-convened initiative. FAST’s mission is to ameliorate common challenges such as identity management, finding FHIR endpoints and data exchange with or without intermediaries. While this work is not specific to health equity, it is work that is necessary in order for the functional use cases that are specific to health equity to unlock key data elements needed to support health equity initiatives
HIEs and health tech vendors can play a key role in moving this infrastructure work forward.
Establishing trust is a bedrock of interoperability. Third-party accreditation from a known, established, and highly regarded entity can help establish confidence that an accredited entity has met a high-bar of standards and compliance, creating trust between organizations with accreditation. In this panel, industry leaders in accreditation will discuss the role why and how accreditation is important for establishing trust as a means to expand interoperability.
Sponsored by Secure Exchange Solutions
TEFCA QHIN Lunch Meet Up
Join the speakers from the TEFCA panel including leaders from The Sequoia Project for an informal discussion following their breakout session. This will be a place to bring questions and to connect with peers on this important topic.
Grab your lunch and meet in conference rooms 1-4.
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