ONC, Medicaid, to partner on state info exchange

The Office of the National Coordinator’s Federal Health Architecture office is developing a version of its "Connect" software that would help expand health information sharing between Medicaid and other state health offices, as well as with federal and commercial health service agencies.   

The project is a collaboration between FHA and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Division of State Systems to produce a version of Connect that is enabled for the Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA). MITA is a technology and business roadmap for Medicaid system modernization.

The joint-effort was announced at the Medicaid Management Information Systems conference in Chicago this week.

Leaders of the project envision that Connect could help turn legacy state Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) into engines of  health information sharing  across states, where health and social services agencies have traditionally been disconnected from one another.

Connect is a software pipe designed by 20 federal health care agencies that allows organizations to exchange health information according to standards for the National Health Information Network.

Vish Sankaran, director of the FHA project in the Office of the National Coordinator, said MITA-Connect will “allow state entities better collaboration within state agencies and also within the federal government.”

Rick Friedman, director of CMS’s Division of State Systems said that for Medicaid, the collaboration is a step toward having more robust information sharing between state health agencies and between state and federal health agencies.

“Ultimately we’d like to have an interconnected world in which there’s so much information at the federal level from places like the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) from the DOD, from VA. And hopefully with a push of the button we’ll be able to talk to each other. They are as interested in our data as we are interested in theirs.”

“We’re really talking about communities collaborating across the current boundaries of public heath,” he added.

A FHA-MITA workgroup has been set up which is now evaluating MITA requirements for health information exchange, Sankaran said. Once those are understood, FHA will identify Connect features that meet those requirements. The good news, he said, is that MITA already meets many of the requirements  for meaningful use of health information exchange that FHA plans to incorporate in Connect.

Sankaran estimates a MITA-enabled version of MITA-Connect will be available next Spring.

Texas, which has been working to link its healthcare and social services agencies through its Web-based Health Passport Project, and Indiana, a leader in state health information exchange, have expressed interest in the MITA-Connect project, officials said.

Sankaran said the aim of the Federal Health Architecture as well as the MITA-Connect project is to make health information sharing a utility-type service. “We’re spending a lot of time at the lower level of the stack, what we call health information exchange,” he said. “What we really need to focus on is make HIE a commodity.”

Using eligibility determination as an example, he said, “ it  takes going through so many agencies to understand what you’re eligible for. What we need to get to is a world where it is the role of the state and federal government to coordinate at the back end and make these coordinated services available to the citizen.”