How a Health Information Exchange Consortium Helped Cut Costs

While Alaska is physically removed from the continental United States, the state’s health information exchange (HIE), healtheConnect Alaska, has joined a health IT consortium that connects them with stateside HIEs to save costs and promote innovation.

The HIE joined CRISP Shared Services, a collaborative of the Maryland statewide HIE and the HIE in Washington DC.

“Geographically on the surface, it doesn't look like it makes sense,” Laura Young, executive director of healtheConnect Alaska, said in an interview with EHRIntelligence.

However, while Alaska is not likely to share patients with HIEs located in the continental US, healtheConnect Alaska shares similar values and technology with CRISP Shared Services, Young explained.

The decision to connect comes as HIEs across the country see their financial resources quickly drying up, as some federal aid allocated via the HITECH Act is set to run out in the coming months.

“The HITECH program really pushed the HIEs to be innovative and they kind of rewarded us with dollars for doing that,” Young explained. “With that program going away, I think that a lot of the future innovations are really going to be born out of collaboratives like this, where we're working together on a solution that we can all share and then maybe even give to others.”

That funding challenge compounds when looking at such a rural place like Alaska. HIEs are crucial to rural healthcare because they help connect patients receiving care in smaller remote centers or in the few larger organizations that anchor rural regions. But despite that importance, rural HIEs are in a unique financial position.

“In Alaska, we have a very small population,” Young explained. “We're trying to do the same things some of these bigger states are doing with technology, but we have less population and dollars to support it.”

healtheConnect joined in the industry trend toward healthcare consolidation, opting for an HIE consortium. Unlike an HIE acquisition or merger, which has its own pros and cons, Young said joining a consortium allowed for local governance and maintenance of healtheConnect's values.

“Alaska is very mindful of being Alaska-centric, and so we really had to look at a collaboration that was going to allow us to be Alaska without giving up our identity,” Young noted.

“The CRISP Shared Services group has some similar technologies too, so it meant that we didn't have to do a complete migration to a whole other technology platform,” she continued. “We can maintain a lot of the things that we've already built. For us, it was really about how we could be the least disruptive in terms of any changes that we made.”

CRISP Shared Services presents data in a master patient index that has multiple lives in it for each state’s HIE, allowing for the organizations to share technology costs.

Young also explained that healtheConnect will benefit from the consortium from an innovation standpoint.

“Health information exchanges have been going on over 10 years now and we're all finding that we have some common problems to solve,” said Young. “The idea behind it is to come together to share technology ideas, resources, and best practices around health information exchange.”

Young explained that the HIEs have a lot of exciting projects up their sleeves that healtheConnect Alaska is eager to learn from in the pursuit of EHR optimization. Additionally, Young noted that healtheConnect Alaska looks forward to bringing its own expertise in behavioral health data exchange and lab data sharing to the collaboration.

“It really truly is a collaborative where we're sharing best practices and ideas and learning,” she said.

COVID-19 highlighted the importance of data analytics to quickly provide population snapshots from a tracking perspective, Young explained.

Going forward, Young said that she believes health IT will continue to move into the interoperability sphere through more data dashboards and further data aggregation.

Additionally, access to data that gives holistic population insights can improve care coordination and population health.

“HIEs that can help provide that type of information are going to be successful, so that's the types of innovations we're really looking forward to incorporating in this partnership,” Young concluded. “It's not something that we're doing a lot of today and we're definitely very much looking forward to being able to do a lot more of that population management with the data that we have.”