MEDNET Chief Architect Seonho Kim and MEDNET CEO John Fraser personally demonstrated the new NHIN Medicaid MITA Specification to Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) at the HiMSS Annual Conference in Atlanta.
Seonho Kim has been leading the MITA workgroup on the NHIN Specification Factory to design the new Medicaid NHIN MITA eligibility transaction.
The MEDNET and CHIC/HIE-Bridge Medicaid MITA Eligibility Demonstration in the Interoperability Showcase has been listed in the HiMSS Daily as a featured exhibit at the HiMSS Annual Conference!
Click here for more information on the exhibit!
If you are attending the upcoming HiMSS Conference in Atlanta make sure you stop by and see:
MEDNET Chief Architect Seonho Kim will be demonstrating the MITA Medicaid NHIN Specification in the ONC booth at the Interoperability Showcase. This demo shows the future of instant Medicaid eligibility for HIEs, over the NHIN.
MEDNET CEO John Fraser speaking in Breakout Session 246 on Thursday on NHIN and Federated Identity Management.
As always, plenty of MEDNET staff will be at the show and around, make sure to contact us if you would like to connect and discuss HIE, NHIN, and the future of healthcare!
- By Dale Emerson
Sustainability is the ultimate goal for any HIE. The success and sustainability of an HIE is built on three key factors:
- Developing trust between HIE stakeholders and using that trust to obtain important financial data and information.
- Creating realistic, believable, and supported financial models to obtain the buy-in from all stakeholders.
- Providing various tools to respond to changes in the environment and make real time modifications to the financial model.
In order to create a believable financial model, stakeholders need to provide data and information about their current and planned operations. In many instances, stakeholders may be competitors and therefore reluctant to share their data and information. Using a third party that is viewed as a trusted resource by all stakeholders is critical to obtaining the required data and information. In order to be believable, it must be sanitized using a process of obtaining the information, analyzing it, reporting it and discussing it, while maintaining the confidentially of the information for each stakeholder.
Once the financial model is built, there must be a mechanism for changing it as the environment changes. In addition, it must accommodate input in various forms from diverse stakeholders. “Dashboard” type applications and tools are relatively common in the private sector, and can be easily adapted for use in healthcare. They will allow decision makers to input data and information, change assumptions and strategies, and immediately see the impact on the underlying financial model.
In summary, it is critical to start with solid data and information. This can only be obtained if a certain level of trust exists with the stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to start the HIE process with an open and transparent process that builds trust from the beginning. When trust is developed, then reliable and believable financial information can be collected, analyzed and reported.
- By John Fraser
The Social Security Administration (SSA) just funded 15 NHIN projects to dramatically speed up delivery of SSA benefits to injured workers. This is an exciting new project for the Nationwide Health Information Network and the 15 contracted entities. MEDNET is proud to be one of the project participants.
How will this SSA project work and what is the impact? Providers will use a local health information exchange to connect through the NHIN to the SSA. SSA spends over $500 million a year to enroll injured workers into SSA disability programs, a paper-intensive process that can delay an injured workers benefits for months. Using the NHIN standards for electronic data exchange, SSA expects to reduce the injured workers wait for benefits from months to weeks, and potentially days. This means a disabled person unable to work can receive financial support quickly. In Minnesota there are over 100,000 injured workers relying on SSA disability benefits to help feed their families.
Compatibility with other health information exchanges is another benefit of adopting NHIN. SSA is one of the first agencieCompatibility with other health information exchanges is another benefit of adopting NHIN. SSA is one of the first agencies to fund a number of NHIN connections, and other federal agencies including CDC, the VA and DoD are also implementing NHIN projects. This means NHIN connectivity can now be seen as a key connectivity standard for federal business, now and in the future. From SSA disability, to public health reporting, to eligibility determinations for Medicaid, many federal agencies have decided to transition their business processes to NHIN.
As health information exchanges (HIE) are built, and HIEs utilize the NHIN standards, they will reduce the risk of becoming obsolete or isolated, and increase the opportunities for federal connectivity and interoperability. NHIN helps to “future-proof” health information exchanges that adopt the underlying technologies of the NHIN.
Be sure to hear John Fraser speak at Session 246 on Thursday, March 4th on Identity Management in a Federated NHIN at the HIMSS Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
MEDNETWorld.com (MEDNET) will be featured at the March 1-4, 2010 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Atlanta, Ga. with a special demonstration at the “Interoperability Booth” by MEDNET Chief Architect Seonho Kim. On March 4, MEDNET CEO John Fraser will give a presentation on Identity Management in a Federated Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).
The demonstration will show how administrative data is exchanged across the NHIN between a state Medicaid organization, an HIE and a healthcare provider. Enabling Medicaid Eligibility Verification through the NHIN will allow providers, health care organizations and health information technology vendors to more quickly and cost-efficiently support administrative transactions between the health care provider and payer communities.
Kim was appointed to lead the NHIN Medicaid Eligibility Project team to develop new NHIN specifications for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as part of the Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA) initiative. Kim has extensive experience designing distributed systems for academia and industry and sits on several national healthcare committees and NHIN workgroup and committees. Fraser was also appointed a member of the project team and will contribute his industry knowledge and expertise.
MEDNET and Hielix jointly announced they will again partner to deliver the free HIE educational webinar series in February, 2010, due to overwhelming demand. MEDNET and Hielix collaborated and delivered the HIE educational Webinar series in December, 2009 to extermely high demand and attendance, on the subjects of HIE solutions, process, organizational structure and HIE technology solutions.
Attendees can register for the Free Webinar Series by clicking the links below:
Webinar 1: HIE Building Blocks and HIE 101 – February 17th – 2pm EST
Webinar 2: HIE Infrastructure and Business Models – February 17th – 3pm EST
Webinar 3: NHIN the Nationwide Health Information Network – February 18th – 2pm EST
Webinar 4: HIE Growth and Sustainability – February 18th – 3pm EST
By Dale Emerson, COO of Hielix
HIE is not about technology – technology certainly helps but HIE is more about change. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information at Department of Health and Human Services recently stated “People working in health IT should think about electronic health records, not as a technology project but as a change management project. Components of Meaningful Use include sociology, psychology, behavior change and the mobilization of levers to change complex systems and improve their performance”. Healthcare is now facing one of its biggest challenges in history as they convert to electronic records. The benefits seem obvious – better care coordination, lower costs, and higher quality of care. So why are healthcare providers not rushing to embrace HIE? It seems that many of them have been waiting for this whole computer fad to pass and for paper and pencil to resume its natural place as the leading technology. However, the more likely cause is people’s natural resistance to change.
Change forces to people to adopt new ways of doing their jobs. Routine in work related tasks has a calming effect on workers. Workers like to know what is expected of them and they take pleasure in knowing how to do their jobs satisfactorily. Whenever change is introduced into the workplace, it disrupts the normal flow of work and may cause people to resist the change. Even when workers understand the rational for the change and may even agree with it logically, emotionally they will remain skeptical.
Frequently, workers are not shown how the change impacts them directly. Will I be able to perform the new work tasks as well as I could the old tasks? If I don’t perform as well, will that impact my employment? Will I still have the same power and prestige in the organization? Will the change eliminate my job? Will I still be working with the same people who I know and trust? Does my superior know how the change will impact them and what does that mean for me? Faced with these questions, it is easy to understand why HIE has taken so long to gain traction. In order to help people with change, we offer six key concepts that will help make the transformation easier.
- Create a compelling vision that people can easily understand and embrace.
- Be open, honest and transparent in how you relate to your staff. Good communications is the most important attribute you have to help you manage through the process.
- Provide individual leadership and it starts with you. Change affects everyone, including you so lead by example.
- Change involves risk. Follow a sound change management process to reduce these risks and improve the probability of success.
- Be prepared to stay committed through the whole process. Any change process will have ups and downs and will meet some level of natural resistance so you have to be prepared to follow the plan even when it all seems to be so hard.
- Get the right resources to help you. You will certainly need support internally and maybe externally. Find the early adopters and get them to help lead the change effort. Reach out to a neutral, external resource that can help you change and offer an unbiased view of your world.
Following these simple tips can really accelerate the adoption of HIE in your organization. While these tips are simple in concept, they can be very difficult in reality so understand the challenge, be prepared to face it and your odds of success will improve.
By John Fraser, MEDNET
The federal government is continuing to develop NHIN, the Nationwide Health Information Network. NHIN has been focused on sharing clinical information between hospitals, clinics and federal agencies. Recently, however, the design of two new standards for NHIN, related to Medicaid insurance eligibility and Medicare quality reporting, has been of focus.
Medicaid is a government program for low income Americans, partially funded by the federal government, and administered and run by each state / territory (there are 54 current Medicaid systems today). Each of these 54 Medicaid programs run eligibility systems to help providers check Medicaid insurance eligibility, ensuring providers properly bill and provide appropriate services for patients. Providers check Medicaid eligibility frequently, since many Medicaid enrollees enter and leave the Medicaid program monthly. Given this turnover, and the number of different Medicaid systems, it has been challenging for providers to directly check Medicaid eligibility within their states and in bordering states.
In 2005, the Center for Medicaid and State Operations (CMSO) within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) developed the MITA program to directly address this issue. The MITA program is a collaboration of all the state Medicaid systems and CMSO to “establish national guidelines for technologies and processes that can enable improved program administration for Medicaid enterprises.”
One MITA-sponsored project is to develop and prototype a national NHIN service that would allow providers to quickly check a patient’s Medicaid status using a single system. This single system service would allow Medicaid providers a secure way to check any one of the 54 Medicaid systems with the click of a mouse (using the Internet). All a provider would need is an Internet connection, proper security credentials and connectivity to a health information exchange that has NHIN connectivity. Once installed, providers could see such benefits as improved patient care, improved cash flow, and an overall improved process from the Medicaid single system service.
Seonho Kim, Chief Architect at MEDNET, is leading the NHIN planning group to develop and test this new Medicaid single system service. MEDNET and Seonho will be demonstrating the Medicaid MITA NHIN service with the Department of Health and Human Services in the upcoming HIMSS conference in Atlanta in March. Please feel free to stop by at the Interoperability Demonstration area to see how this new Medicaid system works, and impact this system would have on healthcare.