Alabama Medicaid Recipients To Benefit from Better Coordinated Care and Improved Health Data Exchange
To provide Alabama Medicaid recipients more coordinated care, including for some of Alabama’s most vulnerable residents, Alabama One Health Record® (ALOHR) plans to participate in eHealth Exchange’s planned Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) if the network achieves QHIN designation. eHealth Exchange is a candidate QHIN under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s (ONC’s) Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) whose application has been accepted to continue to the testing and project plan phase as part of the process of seeking Designated QHIN status.
This affiliation will enable ALOHR to share medical information through eHealth Exchange’s QHIN, if designated, and represents one of the first Medicaid-focused organizations intending to participate in TEFCA.
“We’re proud ALOHR has selected eHealth Exchange as its anticipated QHIN to serve Alabama Medicaid recipients with more comprehensive healthcare,” said Jay Nakashima, executive director of eHealth Exchange. “Our data-sharing network promotes the seamless sharing of clinical and claims data to support coordinated care efforts across the healthcare landscape, enabling patient-centered care.”
eHealth Exchange is one of six Candidate QHIN organizations under TEFCA announced in February. The eHealth Exchange network is in a testing and project plan phase, which is the next step as part of the process of seeking designation as a QHIN under TEFCA. Eligibility requirements under TEFCA include an approximate 12-month go-live timeline from the QHIN application approval, which was publicly announced Feb. 13, 2023, for eHealth Exchange.
“We’re excited to join eHealth Exchange’s QHIN, if designated, to support vulnerable Alabama residents,” said Gary D. Parker, Alabama Medicaid chief data officer & director of ALOHR. “We will be able to tap into a much broader network of healthcare providers across Alabama and the entire country to access the information needed to improve patient care, support effective healthcare, reduce duplication of treatments, and help to avoid costly mistakes. Every healthcare provider in Alabama – regardless of whether it’s a small rural doctor’s office or a large hospital system in our largest city – needs to have easy access to important health information to deliver the best possible care.”
eHealth Exchange ranks as one of the nation’s oldest and largest health information networks, and its health data network has 14 years of experience supporting large-scale health information exchange across a network of diverse participants.
eHealth Exchange features inclusive and participatory governance and a data storage model that allows participants to retain full autonomy and control over how they handle critical issues related to patient matching, cybersecurity, legal compliance, and audit logging. This level of control is particularly important for federal agencies, as well as state and regional health information exchanges (HIEs), that operate under varying regulatory requirements.
Learn more about eHealth Exchange’s plan to become a QHIN at http://www.BeMyQHIN.org.