Washington State Clinical Data Repository

To improve the coordination of care provided for all Washingtonians as well as to improve healthcare quality and outcomes, the Washington State Health Care Authority engaged OTB Solutions to provide Project Management services for a multi-year initiative to advance the statewide electronic exchange of near real-time, integrated clinical data. Working with the State Health Information Exchange (HIE), OneHealthPort, as the solution vendor, HCA implemented a single platform care- management solution to create a clinical data repository (CDR) service for 1.8M Apple Health (Medicaid) managed care enrollees.

The Challenge

Provider organizations have made significant investments in certified EHR technology and have gained experience getting data into these systems for use across their enterprise. Collectively, not as much progress has been made in getting data out of these systems to share with members of the care team outside of their own enterprise. Providers have significant challenges in achieving broad scale levels of exchange for a number of reasons, including: variability of systems and insufficient standardization, still evolving EHR systems and expensive direct interfacing, slow EHR adoption in small clinics and Behavioral Health settings, providers lacking capacity for developing additional infrastructure and lack of a shared understanding of what is legally defensible in terms of sharing personal health information through an HIE. The implementation of tools such as this aim to “fill the gaps”.

What Was At Stake

This lack of data exchange created various problems – insufficient integration of clinical and behavioral data for care coordination and population management, organizations taking on payment risk lack needed data sets, providers/payers relying on costly manual work arounds, providers struggling to meet Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements and providers/payers having inadequate reporting and analytics capabilities.

The Solution

OTB Solutions delivered Project Management and strategy services relying on our extensive experience in both the public and private sectors. Key deliverables included:

A Deployment Strategy
Integrated work plans
Project logs and ongoing project documentation
Risk mitigation strategies
Training Plans
Readiness Assessment tool and related planning

Results

Stage 1 of the CDR was successfully launched in early 2017, with further functionality deployments under discussion. Currently there are >10M client records in the CDR and dozens of providers participate. The intent is to expand beyond Medicaid enrollee data and to add prescription monitoring, immunization and other registry data as well as social determinant data.