Opioid Reporting
The program puts steps in place to help the region combat the opioid epidemic:
- It provides data to the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health Opioid Surveillance Task Force on opioid use disorders or overdoses for Philadelphia residents based on the Admission Discharge Transfer (ADT) messages from HSX-contributing emergency departments and acute care hospitals.
- It also offers opioid alerts for to primary care providers about their patients. HSX’s Opioid Crisis Task Force is now in the process of rolling out this important service. Through HSX’s Encounter Notification Service, primary care practices can receive alerts when their subscribed patients are discharged with an opioid-related diagnosis. HSX has established these condition-specific alerts based on ADT data from the region’s medical facilities. The service gives primary care providers the opportunity to quickly follow up to connect the patients with addiction recovery resources after they have been discharged with an opioid-related condition.
Drug Assistance and other Benefits for the Elderly
Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, selected the HSX Population Health Program to participate in an initiative called CIC-START (Community Impact Contracts – Strategic, Timely, Actionable, Replicable, Targeted). DASH CIC-START aims to accelerate progress towards developing precise, data-driven public health initiatives that are more effective at reducing health disparities by giving local collaborations the momentum they need to take their data-sharing efforts to the next level.
HealthShare Exchange was part of a cohort of sixteen other CIC-START awardees that received $25,000 to execute a project over a period of six months that built their capacity to share and use multi-sector data to improve community health. With inpatient and emergency visit encounter data from HSX member Mercy Health System, HSX identified and connected uninsured and underinsured older adults in southeastern Pennsylvania with the appropriate community assistance programs, through its collaboration with the Pennsylvania Department of Aging’s Pharmaceutical Assistance Contract for the Elderly (PACE) Program and through Benefits Data Trust (BD Trust). The encounter data provided demographic information for patients that had a recent visit to one of Mercy Health System’s hospitals, and BD Trust used this information to help determine eligibility and referral for PACE and other social service programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
The project brought more than $250,000 in benefits to the Greater Philadelphia region’s seniors. Learn more, see a special report on the project.
The Regional Community Health Needs Assessment
In partnership with the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health and several HSX participants, HSX provided healthcare utilization reports for the Regional Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) to identify and prioritize community health needs. View the CHNA.
Montgomery Co. Behavioral Health ED Visits Analysis
HSX’s Population Health Program collected data on the incidence and nature of visits to Montgomery County emergency departments (EDs) by patients for behavioral health needs. The Montgomery County Hospital Partnership provided Montgomery County hospitals and other stakeholders an opportunity to explore how to effectively and safely address patients’ behavioral health needs, including for purposes of referring patients to timely and appropriate treatment, with the aim of ultimately reducing ED use for behavioral health needs. By increasing understanding of the demographics and ED utilization patterns of patients with behavioral health needs in the county, the analysis helped to inform the partnership’s intervention strategies. HSX provided data to the Health Care Improvement Foundation, which analyzed it on behalf of the partnership. HealthSpark Foundation funded this project.
A Retrospective Cross-Sectional Analysis of Asthma, Hypertension and Diabetes Emergency Encounters: New Insights for Community Health Needs Assessments?
Through Thomas Jefferson University’s College of Population Health, HSX’s Senior Fellow, Karla Geisse, performed her masters of public health capstone project, using HSX data to evaluate and characterize health outcomes and determinants, reflect community perspectives, and identify assets of the community to support a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA). This project intended to (1) identify rates and possible disparities of asthma, hypertension, and diabetes among emergency encounters in Philadelphia and (2) assess the utility of the HSX’s Clinical Data Repository for Community Health Needs Assessments.