The Pennsylvania eHealth Partnership Authority has awarded onboarding grants of $675,000 to help connect hospitals and ambulatory practices to the authority’s Pennsylvania Patient & Provider Network, or P3N. The P3N enables electronic health information exchange (eHIE) across the state through the connection of healthcare providers to health information organizations (HIOs), and the connection of HIOs to the P3N.

HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania will receive $355,000, and Geisinger Clinic, which operates the Keystone Health Information Exchange, will receive $319,783.14.

The funding for this program was made available through a grant from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and is being administered in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. Under the terms of the federal grant, CMS will provide 90 percent of the onboarding grant, with the authority required to provide the remaining 10 percent.

The onboarding grant serves several important purposes:

• Supports private-sector HIOs by helping them increase their membership and support their sustainability models
• Incentivizes HIOs to join the P3N, a precondition for receiving funding
• Supports rapid movement toward the critical mass of participation in eHIE that will make such participation part of a new, higher standard of care and support various care reform efforts currently underway across the state
• Defrays upfront costs for individual providers to join an HIO, thus helping to satisfy obligations under the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program

The authority will announce another round of onboarding grant opportunities later this year.