Colorado RHIO to integrate behavioral health data with statewide HIE

Following the results and recommendations of a report from solicited feedback from communities across Colorado focused on the inclusion of behavioral health in health information exchange (HIE), the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO) is developing an action plan to include working with project steering committee members and other stakeholder organizations on consumer, provider and policymaker education.

CORHIO partnered with a multi-stakeholder behavioral health steering committee to create the report, written as part of the CORHIO Behavioral Health Information Exchange Project with support from Rose Community Foundation. According to the results, nearly 90 percent of stakeholders surveyed believe behavioral health should be considered part of a person’s overall healthcare.

To solicit information for the report, CORHIO helped facilitate six meetings in communities across Colorado, which were chosen to represent a broad cross-section of perspectives and attitudes regarding HIE. A total of 124 consumers, physicians and other behavioral health stakeholders were in attendance to discuss the concerns, opportunities and priorities of exchanging behavioral health information.

A few key points that came out of the community discussions included:

• Consumers expressed significant interest in having access to their health information within the HIE;
• Both physicians and patients expressed significant concerns, such as privacy issues and inappropriate use of information;
• Behavioral health stakeholders agree that better information sharing can lead to better outcomes for individuals and populations receiving behavioral healthcare; and
• Participants expressed they would have more comfort with information sharing if there were more choice about which information would be shared with whom. Current models of all-in or all-out information sharing do not seem to meet the needs of this community.

Several recommendations were made, including:

• Include the behavioral health community in the development of statewide HIT starting today;
• Endorse a broader, statewide health integration agenda to promote better, coordinated, less fragmented care; and
• Develop a communication and outreach plan that supports education for all stakeholders regarding HIE and targeted education for physical health professionals on working with the behavioral health community.

The Denver-based CORHIO concluded that in addition to partnering with behavioral heath stakeholders, it will continue to conduct regular reviews of policies and practices to ensure federal and state policy frameworks evolve with new healthcare delivery and payments systems and advances in treatment models. CORHIO will also work with it’s technology partner, Medicity, to improve HIE technology to support more granular options for patient choice regarding which information is shared with whom.