The CCC's IT team is working to drive improvement in the areas of data exchange (making it more complete, moving it faster, and putting the right data where it is needed), governance and security (making it legal and safe), encouraging collaboration amongst the geeks, building new systems where there are gaps, and helping to improve existing systems.

What We're Doing

During DSRIP Demonstration Year (DY) 3, our focus was on analyzing the current state of our network HER because you can't glue together pieces you don't understand, and completing a thorough as-is inventory. This included a review of CCC providers' EHRs to ascertain which systems are in use, what data is being collected, and what is and is not working. We also worked to understand existing community investments in health care IT.

As we move into DY4, we are solidifying the core of our internal team as we move from a part-time contract staff to a fully-functioning team who will define detailed project plans for key pilot projects. A few highlights of this work are:

• The OHCA: If we want the patient to have "no wrong door" access to care - we need the data to flow more easily. To do this, the CCC is defining an Organized Healthcare Arrangement (OHCA) - which will allow us to more easily share health information among all CCC participants.
• CCC Warehouse: The CCC plans to build a data warehouse to house a variety of data, provide dashboards to our DSRIP team, and help the CCC understand the big picture of what's happening. This is a core foundation system that we will build reporting, analytics, and decision support functions on top of.
• One Button: Care teams need a simple way to see what the entire network knows about a patient... as easy as clicking one button. The data needs to be accurate - it needs to be inserted in the clinical workflow when the care team needs it - and the whole package needs to be usableand timely. We are working on the first phase of this project, which will focus on getting the answer to a key question in the hands of our primary care providers: "Was my patient in the Seton Emergency Room last night? If so, tell me what happened."  Once that question can be answered, we will incrementally improve data exchange functionality.
• Collaborative Care Plan: Every provider has their own approach to care planning, but no member of the overall care team has a holistic view of the big picture neither the individual plans integrated together. Our first step is to get each CCC provider team to push their care plans to the community HIE and obtain consensus from these teams on what the aggregate care plan should look and feel like.

In addition to pushing out new systems and innovations, we also plan to work within the CCC clinical workgroups to flesh out the requirements for a wide variety of projects - initially we are focused in moving in baby-steps and building out high-quality "plumbing" - meaning getting the data foundation improved so we can build new systems down the road.