e-Health Connectivity Grant
Champ has received news that the 4 regional grant applications we submitted for the Minnesota Department of Health HIE Grant were approved. The grant projects have been awarded approximately 1 million dollars collectively.
You can visit the Minnesota Department of Health Website for more information on the awards: http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/hpsc/ohit/hiegrants.html.
On that page there is a list of 2012 Grant Recipients.
Partnering with Champ on the MN Health Data Exchange Project are:
- Douglas County Public Health for West Central HIE Partner Project
- Isanti County Public Health for East Central HIE Partner Project
- Norman-Mahnomen Public Health for Northwest HIE Partner Project
- Southwest Health and Human Services for Southwest HIE Partner Project
David Rosebaugh, CEO, and Rob Colwill, Development Project Manager, have put a lot of time and effort into this project and now they’ll be even busier as the development and project coordination takes off!
The Minnesota Health Information Exchange Program will equip various agencies in the geographic area served with the ability to exchange clinical summary care records as required in Meaningful Use Stage 2. The initial focus will be a Continuity of Care Document (CCD), and health history.
Once these elements are in place, Champ will continue working with the participants beyond this grant to exchange other elements like lab and radiology reports, progress notes, and physician orders. This project is designed to gather requirements; document use cases; and provide useable software, processes, and training materials as a result.
Champ has created a presentation available in PowerPoint and PDF that highlights the components and plans for this project.
Click here to download the Powerpoint Presentation of the Grant Proposal Presentation
Click here to download the PDF format of the Grant Proposal Presentation
Below is the map of all regions who is involved in the project:
Update 8/29/2013
The Minnesota Data Exchange Grant program was given a deadline extension to the end of this year. During this extension period, we will be working on several things.
Firstly, we are working with Nightingale Notes EHR users to register them with the HL7 organization. This registration is necessary in order to get them an Object Identifier (OID). The OID is needed as a security feature to identify the sender of data as an acceptable entity to gain access to another entity.
In this case we are working on a peer-to-peer connection with Allina for Epic users in order to access CCDs. Epic and Allina OID values have already been set up on Champ’s end, so that Epic users will be able to request and receive CCDs from Nightingale Notes.
Also, several users have already begun to test the Direct (secure email solution). Those partners that chose to use Direct and have not yet tested it will be doing so.
User interface work is in progress in Nightingale Notes to generate CCDs including adding a field to track the patient’s consent for their data to be shared.
Update 8/1/2013
The MN Health Information Data Exchange Project is making great strides in connecting a large number of health care providers in the state. Nightingale Notes has undergone two key improvements that form the foundation of this data exchange:
- Nightingale Notes has been updated to use standardized code sets for important demographic and clinical data. Agencies are reviewing and approving the changes to their data currently and soon we will make the data updates for agencies that have given approval. This keeps the product and our customers current with healthcare standards.
- Nightingale Notes is now able to create a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) which provides a standards-compliant summary of patient care for use in a wide variety of scenarios and workflows within an agency.
In addition to the changes to Nightingale Notes, there has been significant progress on the development of our data exchange capabilities.
Champ Software has partnered with Mirth Corporation to provide up-to-date and well supported data exchange capabilities. Over the past months the data exchange service has been prepared and configured for data exchange between Nightingale Notes and other healthcare systems and health information exchanges (HIEs).
At this point in time, Nightingale Notes is integrating with CHIC (Minnesota’s certified Health Information Organization) to provide a secure email service to all of those participating in the grant as well as working towards a connection with the Allina network here in Minnesota.
Together these efforts will connect over 100 health care providers and begin to improve patient care through timely, accessible and accurate data exchange.
