2019 State HIT Connect Summit

Health Information Exchanges (HIE) and state leaders have a unique opportunity to partner to advance and improve the health care of their states, regions and the nation. During this session, you will hear from Colorado and Pennsylvania HIE and state leaders. Learning objectives will include: 1) overview of HIEs—different types and services offered; 2) use cases showing successes of the partnership; 3) opportunities and approaches to forge a relationship with your HIE and state officials if one does not exist; and 4) understanding the national landscape of interoperability just to name a few.

States are looking to reduce reliance on ‘big bang’ implementations in line with CMS’ guidance on leveraging more modular modernization strategies in order to reduce costs and to enable the IT organization to be more responsive to citizen needs and programmatic outcomes. In order for states to meet with these objectives, they are increasingly looking to agile implementation principles that leverage integration and cloud platforms. Join this workshop to understand state experiences in adopting these models and from vendors who are partnering with states in supporting the transition from both a technology and organizational change management perspective.


Panelist questions will include:
1 -What are some of the most important business drivers in making the decision to embark on this trajectory?
2 -In terms of lessons learned, readiness assessments, what are some of the considerations states should be thinking about when transitioning to this approach?
3 -What capabilities can vendors bring to state teams as partners on these efforts?
4 - What are the major impacts of organizational change management? How is this impacting skillset, HR requirements?
5 - What’s the role of procurement in fulfilling this vision, how have states evolved explored evolving procurement processes?

From health systems to clinicians to health plans to vendors, from New York to Washington D.C. to industry collaborations, from right-now progress to near-term 2020 expectations of “open APIs”:  hear about the standards-based efforts of industry leaders engaged in meeting the challenges of value-based care.
 
Hear about the challenges, the opportunities and updates on the variety of industry stakeholders who are having success and making progress on data access and health information exchange – to support value-based care.
 
In February HHS announced proposed new rules to improve the interoperability of electronic health information. In support of patient-centered healthcare, the proposed CMS and ONC rules focus on open API standards (HL7 FHIR) and are anticipated to require health care providers and plans to implement open data sharing technologies to support transitions of care, provide easy access to electronic health information, and reduce provider burden, as basis for giving clinicians more time to focus on improving care.
 
Hear from several healthcare leaders who are accelerating interoperability in the organizations they support. This panel discussion will focus on:
 

• What standard-based open APIs (HL7 FHIR) and who are the industry collaborations focused on accelerating interoperability
• benefits and challenges of adapting health information exchange solutions to support value-based payment initiatives
• Updates on the DSRIP Efforts in New York  encompasses providers, payers, and an all-payer database initiative
• Tales from the Front on the status and progress of the New York All-Payer Database, as a resource to support data analyses on health care trends and improvement opportunities
• Overview and status of the ONC FHIR At Scale Taskforce and the HL7 Da Vinci Project

Traditional approaches to large-scale MMIS systems no longer work.  Custom developed applications are too inflexible built on an aging technology stack, while Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) applications and modules sit on fragile platforms, too rigid to change or integrate.  Both force the business to change to adapt to technology, rather than adapting the technology to the business.
These approaches run counter to concepts of modularity and interoperability – how can you connect disparate technologies when they weren’t designed to operate with other technologies or within your legacy environment? What if, instead, MMIS modules were built in a single platform, reusable across modules and applications with everything needed to develop enterprise applications – case management, business process management, integrations, rules, etc. – sat in a single platform, reusable across modules and applications? What if all development was done in low or no code –making it easy to change quickly and connect? Discuss how modern development platforms offer an alternative. How can these platforms enable faster, flexible modular system configuration? Meet with thought leaders across the technology transformation spectrum— program experts, experienced integrators, and proven technology innovators— to discuss the pros and cons of using a platform based approach for your Medicaid systems.

Public agencies are starting to scratch the surface on how to improve outcomes and maintain overall health by addressing the broader social needs of individuals. Collectively, these are often called social determinants of health (SDOH), and they include basic needs such as access to housing, utilities, transportation, education, food, employment, and more. As states increasingly integrate programs, systems, and the supporting data, they are making strides in improving community health and outcomes by viewing the broader needs of individuals through the lens of social determinants.

This panel discussion session will feature state agency professionals who are applying social determinants in various ways. We will discuss their approach, why they’re doing it, and how they’re proceeding, as well as the hurdles, and the efforts to overcome them. We will focus on the integration of data and use of analytics, and how these leaders are implementing a “culture of analytics” to determine the effectiveness of services they provide and to improve the health of their citizens.

Modernizing your Medicaid system can present many challenges and can often impact the very citizens you are trying to help, such as when errors occur in determining eligibility for Medicaid. Although MAGI Medicaid was implemented for Arkansas in 2013, the non-MAGI Medicaid continued to reside on the mainframe-based legacy system with both systems providing independent feeds to MMIS.  This resulted in an unacceptably high percentage of eligibility errors.
 
This session will discuss how a single streaming process was designed and developed by eSystems for Arkansas DHS, where the MAGI-Medicaid system intercepted the legacy Non-MAGI segments, verified, cleansed and compiled them along with the MAGI segments into a single stream, and then sent them to MMIS. This project has been a huge success and has reduced error rates from an average of 10% to 1-2%.

As Medicaid Programs continue to look for ways to improve health outcomes and reduce cost, how a State drives optimum value out of their managed care partners is a critical element in this equation. Accenture thought leaders will discuss innovative approaches in program design, management, operations, and analytics that will drive improvement in the managed care model.  We will discuss how to improve the provider and member experience, how to measure and manage for outcomes, how to design the program to leverage strengths and mitigate weaknesses of partners, and how to operate in a way that maintains the State’s insight into performance.

The federal government offers financial assistance to states for deploying information health information technology (HIT) solutions to support their Medicaid programs. States request IT funding by submitting an Advanced Planning Document (APD) to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The APD provides details about the requested funding, the projects that will be undertaken, and the milestones the state proposes to achieve with the HIT project(s). Traditionally, Medicaid has funded the design development, and implementation of HIT projects under HITECH funds, which sunsets in 2021. CMS has expanded funding to States via traditional Medicaid IT (MMIS, MES, E&E) funding mechanisms for systems integrators, project management, and maintenance and operations to sustain HIT investments. States must connect their funding requests to MITA requirements to receive approval and drawdown HIT funds under MES authority.  Come learn about Maryland’s experience doing the planning work necessary to make this transition happen.

With states under tremendous pressure to modernize and develop more effective Medicaid IT systems that align with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) modularity mandate, agencies are looking to streamline infrastructure while reducing implementation cost, time, and risk. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) has adopted big data analytics to gain insight into ways to lower costs and improve outcomes for their Medicaid program. Analytics has provided the foundation for a growing number of government healthcare initiatives. These include population health management, value-based care, hospital re-admissions reductions, and clinical decision support. One the major challenges that states face is not a lack of data, but that they have too much of it. The challenge is how to discern what data is important and how to use it.

Historically, Medicaid agencies have generated enormous amounts of data and have faced technological challenges in aggregating, storing, analyzing, and visualizing this data due not only to its sheer volume, but also to privacy concerns. Over the past several years, KDHE, in partnership with its vendors, have brought numerous new data sources together and developed the capability to use and generate data in actionable and innovative ways. These include the use of near real-time analytics for program monitoring, which integrates healthcare data from multiple sources and in different formats into a comprehensive 360-degree Medicaid beneficiary view. Information can be viewed from the program, population demographics or individual level. 

The use of big data analytics has led to a successful realization of the Triple Aim, which translates to an immense savings in health care expenditures, improvements in care quality and greater beneficiary satisfaction and quality of life. Medicaid beneficiaries are typically high-cost, high-need populations and face an array of social, economic, and environmental factors that have a significant impact on their overall health. Given Medicaid’s complex populations and the implications for state budgets, KDHE is particularly interested in using data-driven innovations to enhance and bring efficiencies to the Medicaid program