Important news from HSX from the fourth quarter of 2018:
HIE Updates —
Area Hospital System and Major Insurer Are
Among Latest HSX Participants
This fall brought two important new-member signings for HSX: Tower Health and United Healthcare. Tower operates Reading Hospital, Pottstown Hospital, Phoenixville Hospital, Jennersville Hospital, Brandywine Hospital, and Chestnut Hill Hospital. The addition of Tower Health brings participation in HSX by the region’s health systems and acute-care hospitals to 100 percent. At the same time, participation by United Healthcare, one of the major national providers of healthcare insurance, helps to expand payer membership in HSX to an even greater percentage of covered lives in the Greater Philadelphia and Delaware Valley region, including southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. Data from these two sources will further enrich available patient updates and HSX’s clinical data repository.
Rothman Patients Latest to Benefit from
Automated Discharge Summary to PCPs
Rothman Orthopaedic Specialty Hospital has begun taking advantage of HSX’s Automated Care Team Find (ACTF) service. The hospital provides discharge continuity of care documents (CCDs), which HSX then routes to its healthcare-insurer participants for matching with the patients’ primary care providers (PCPs). (Discharge CCDs are a type of CCD within the CCD architecture (CCDA).) With this information, HSX can then submit the discharge CCD, using Direct secure messaging, to the PCP to ensure that the PCP is updated on the patient’s status. With HSX payer members Independence Blue Cross, Amerihealth Caritas, and Health Partners Plans supporting ACTF, the service has the capability to send discharge CCDs to the PCPs of the majority of insurer-covered patients in HSX’s service area. The goal is to expand this portion of providers/patients benefitting from ACTF further with inclusion of additional payers in the service. With its participation in ACTF, Rothman Orthopaedic Specialty Hospital now has an automated tool for pushing discharge summaries to its patients’ PCPs, for the important step of facilitating continuity of care and any needed follow-up after facility discharge.
HSX Contributes Again to World’s Largest
Health Information Technology Event
HealthShare Exchange’s team arrives enthusiastically — and doing its part again — for the annual conference of HIMSS (the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society). HIMSS19 will take place February 11th–15th at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. This largest annual worldwide meeting for health information technology (HIT) hosts more than 40,000 attendees. HSX’s own Yolande Greene, Senior Project Manager, Population Health, is a poster person for this year’s HIMSS theme of dynamic HIT professionals (“The Gamechanger”). In addition, HSX’s president, Martin Lupinetti will help to kick the meeting off on February 11th, co-presenting a special education session on “Payers’ Role in Health Information Exchange.” Then, the following day, he co-presents a key lecture “Regional Health-Data Sharing Extends to Food & Nutrition,” with Sue Daugherty, Chief Executive Officer of MANNA, the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance — Philadelphia’s well-known nonprofit that delivers prescribed diets to the economically challenged chronically ill. The presentation will describe HSX’s first partnership with a non-medical healthcare-related community organization, an exchange that provides MANNA rapid updates on its clients’ medical events.
Aetna Better Health Now Better Informed with HSX Service
This fall, Aetna Better Health® of Pennsylvnia began receiving notifications from HSX in real time when one its members has an encounter with a regional medical facility. Aetna Better Health provides health benefits and care management for people enrolled in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Medical Assistance program (Medicaid) and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The service that the Aetna plan now enjoys from HSX, the Encounter Notification Service (ENS), permits Aetna Better Health and its care coordinators to engage more promptly and in a more-informed way in the care of members who are admitted to, or discharged or transferred from, a regional hospital or other healthcare facility.
Business Line Expansion, Data Security,
and HIE Champions at HSX Annual Offsite Event
HealthShare Exchange held its yearly offsite event and annual meeting of its board of trustees on November 14. The half-day gathering included demonstration of HSX business lines, an important panel discussion of security and privacy measures around healthcare data, and the award ceremony for regional health information exchange champions of 2018. Read about the meeting, learn more about the security presentation, and meet the new HIE Champions.
This Spring, We’re Moving to Expanded Space
Movin’ on up! Uptown from downtown. In April/May, HSX will move from its current and original Philadelphia location at 18th & Market Sts. to the American College of Physicians building in the Independence Mall / Franklin Square section of the city. The move accommodates HSX’s significant growth in recent years and provides improved space for services, collaboration, and innovation.
Our future address:
190 N. Independence Mall West
Suite 701
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Population Health updates —
CPC+ Reporting Underway
In November, HSX’s Population Health Program took an important step in its role as data aggregator for the Greater Philadelphia Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) initiative. It issued its first reporting to CPC+ participating health plans and provider organizations via a performance reporting portal. Through the portal they created, HSX and its data-processing vendor OnPoint, will refresh the region’s CPC+ reports quarterly and will include additional measures, as well as expanded reporting functionality and process enhancements, as HSX continues to advance population health improvement objectives for its service area. HSX’s pop-health team trained users of the portal earlier in the fall (see photo, top).
The Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) program is a national advanced model that aims to strengthen primary care through regionally-based payment reform and care delivery transformation. The performance reporting portal is a platform that puts actionable measures and information into the hands of key stakeholders to help inform care management and healthcare improvements. Users can identify variations in care within and across their associated organizations and access patient-level detail for follow-up. The portal takes advantage of data from CPC+ participants Independence Blue Cross and Aetna.
As part of the CPC+ initiative, the Greater Philadelphia region’s health plan partners and participating practices are tasked with improving patients’ access, engagement, and care management and coordination. In turn, an incentive model for participating provider organizations establishes payment based on participant performance across a variety of clinical quality and utilization measures selected by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and shared by all CPC+ regions.
Contact us, learn more, sign up for services.
Innovation Updates —
HSX’s MarketStreet Receives U.S.
Economic Development Grant
HSX Innovation, Research and Development continues to build out HSX MarketStreet™, based upon two crucial HSX assets: technological integrations with health system EMRs, and access to clinical data of more than 8 million patients in its service region. HSX MarketStreet has become a two-sided platform connecting these assets with third-party companies who seek to use them to improve their delivery of innovative healthcare solutions and interventions. Commercial applications are now exploring clinical data exchange via MarketStreet for purposes of patient treatment and care coordination, or based on explicit patient consent to have their health information used for a specific application.
HSX MarketStreet’s publicly available developer sandbox, and its APIs (application programming interfaces), are now allowing entities to explore how their services and applications can integrate with the data of a regional health information exchange. Technology companies have begun to test viability of using this data repository, as they develop, enhance, and integrate their offerings. Products/services that test successfully and then come through the platform’s Dataline and Productionline processes, and onto the MarketStreet platform, will range from consumer-facing health-monitoring mobile applications, home monitoring devices, inpatient care-transition tools, prior-authorization and physician-referral solutions, and more.
To support this initiative, HSX MarketStreet recently applied for and received the U.S. Economic Development Administration Regional Strategies Program’s i6 Challenge funding. This grant will stimulate regional economic grow by helping to expand the HSX MarketStreet platform. We thank all of our community partners for their assistance in the application, and we are looking forward to the collaborative efforts.
Contact us, learn more, sign up for services.
In November, the HSX population health and technical implementation team was present in force at the regional CPC+ in-person learning session. The staff had opportunities to explain HSX’s role as data aggregator for the Greater Phila. CPC+ Program.
The HSX team celebrated the holidays at the Revolution House at 2nd &
Market Sts. in Old Towne Philadelphia.