First Quarter, 2023

We're proud to release our annual Letter to the Community, sharing our accomplishments from last year and how we plan to use that momentum for continued progress through 2023.

Just a few highlights include:

• Accomplishments in data quality, access, and contributions, including significant growth in clinical alerts and results delivery through 2022
• Growth in our team, including expanded expertise in clinical informatics, data services, and application development
• New regional, state, and national collaborative partnerships that will continue into 2023
• Commitment to continued improvements to our HIE systems/infrastructure and customer service systems and processes
• Continued support of regional and statewide population and public health opportunities, with a concentration on Social Determinants of Health data

We invite you to read more about where we've been and the goals we're committed to reaching through the course of this year. As always, thank you for your partnership and support!

You may have heard about this initiative over the past year, and we are nearing the anticipated approval of New York State's 1115 Medicaid Waiver. The efforts outlined in this Waiver are designed to reduce health disparities, advance health equity, and support health and social care integration within the Medicaid system. HealtheConnections has been an active participant in regional and statewide conversations about this incredibly important effort, and we have pledged our support of any organization that plans to apply as a Health Equity Regional Organization (HERO) or Social Determinants of Health Network (SDHN) role outlined in the Waiver. 

As the steward of health information exchange data for our 26-county region, HealtheConnections is well-positioned to support many of the data and technology needs for our community, including:

In addition to our local and regional efforts, we're an accredited member of the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY) which will be relied upon to support the 1115 Waiver statewide. The SHIN-NY is committed to leveraging its position to help identify health disparities, understand and communicate social needs, and link clinical providers with community partners. HealtheConnections will be the conduit between the regional HERO, SDHN and the SHIN-NY.

Haven't heard about the Waiver yet? Read about it here.

An important component of the Waiver activities referenced above includes exploring the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) data currently housed in our health information exchange. HealtheConnections has continued it efforts in this space as a member of a workgroup led by our partners at the Bronx RHIO, working to refine the standards for how all regional health information exchanges should be ingesting, handling, and reporting SDoH data to drive a more holistic view of health needs in our communities.

We receive social needs data in several forms. Some data come in as unstructured responses from standard assessment tools like PRAPARE or the AHC HRSN Screening tool, while other data are more structured and come in as ICD-10 Z Codes. The volume of this type of data will only increase as clinical providers begin to use this information and seek to understand it to better serve their patients, and as Waiver activities begin. Standardizing SDoH data received across the state now will be vital to ensuring it is useful for those purposes long-term.

HealtheConnections' health information exchange contains millions of data across a wide variety of demographics - populations in urban centers and rural towns, people of every age, of every race and ethnicity. This offers a unique opportunity for public health surveillance.

We're now in our second year of partnership with the Lantana Consulting Group to pilot the use of health information exchange data for public health use cases relevant to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN).

Last year, we examined the availability and completeness of:

• Inpatient medication data from our HIE for COVID patients to assess whether HIEs could be a source of automated data collection for medication use trends in a public health emergency.
• Clinical narrative data from our HIE to evaluate whether HIEs could serve as source data to inform reporting and feasibility for this type of clinical information.

For both cases, the results were encouraging.

This year, we're continuing the assessment of medication data, with a new focus on the strength of association between medications requested and those administered. We're also evaluating using social determinants of health (SDoH) data collected by Lexis Nexis and HealtheConnections to include in NHSN’s predictive modeling for healthcare-associated infections.

These efforts are providing valuable insight into how HIE data can be an important tool for surveillance, and HealtheConnections is committed to continuing these explorations.

To discuss a potential partnership with us, contact us at support@healtheconnections.org.

HealtheConnections received its fourth consecutive certification letter from HITRUST, recertifying our HIE for another two years. The HITRUST certification attests to our ability to safeguard patient data and is the gold standard of security measures.

To achieve a HITRUST certification, an organization must have policies and procedures documented and prove that these policies and procedures have been implemented and are being followed. This marks HealtheConnections' sixth year of certification.

240,000

image studies received

per month

6M

clinical alerts exchanged

per month

3M

clinical summary documents received

per month

436,000

unique patients accessed per month

500,000

results delivered

per month