MX October Newsletter

A monthly roundup of news and updates from MX

October 2022 Edition

MX Welcomes New Participants!

We are excited to announce that Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, a 357-bed, not-for-profit community hospital and trauma center located in Valencia / Newhall, CA has joined Manifest MedEx’s health data network.

Henry Mayo provides a wide range of care through a number of services: maternity department and childbirth education program, community hospital cancer program, advanced primary stroke center, spine and joint program, an acute rehab unit, growing cardiovascular services, primary and urgent care, outpatient wound care services, physical and occupational therapies, and a wide range of inpatient and outpatient surgical services.

With Manifest MedEx, Henry Mayo intends to provide their physicians, providers and payor partners increased and relevant access to patient data to help streamline workflow, reduce errors, and improve the overall quality within the continuum of care for their patients.

Next Phase of California's Health and Human Services

Data Exchange Framework (DxF) Launches

 

The DxF Implementation Advisory Committee (IAC) held its first meeting in September. The IAC contributes to the state’s DxF planning and is chaired by John Ohanian, director of the California Health and Human Services Center for Data Insights and Innovation (CDII). CDII has additionally convened a new Subcommittee of technical experts on the Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) Policies & Procedures (P&Ps). MX is pleased to serve on both groups, just as we did for the DxF Stakeholder Committee prior to the DSA’s publication. We encourage you to view public livestreams or recordings of these important meetings on CDII’s website.

An immediate task for the IAC and Subcommittee is to advise CDII’s development of a new set of P&Ps that have been prioritized for release ahead of the January 2023 DSA signing deadline for providers and health plans. This includes establishing a Qualified Health Information Organization (QHIO) program for CDII to identify and validate the credentials of data networks that can help DSA signatories meet their obligations. MX will ensure we can operate as a QHIO for all our Participants through a state designation process that is robust and meaningful. Stay tuned for more updates on the DxF!

MX Prepared to Support DxF Educational Initiative Grant Recipients

CDII recently issued a Request for Applications (RFA) for the DxF Educational Initiative, which will award up to $2 million in grants to associations that represent DSA signatories. The funding’s purpose is to support education and outreach that will help signatories understand “what the [DxF] expectations of them are, how to meet them, and how their collective participation will ultimately equip them with more information that they can use to better serve their patients.” Responses to the RFA were due on October 31.

The Educational Initiative is one component of the overall $50 million DxF Grant Program administered by CDII, which will also direct resources to DSA signatories for technical assistance and HIO onboarding. MX is ready to support any Educational Grant recipients with our hands-on experience training new Participants and promoting the value of data sharing. Please contact us at info@manifestmedex.org if interested.

Save the Date!

 

California is currently facing a public health crisis around congenital syphilis (CS).  In 2020, California had the sixth highest rate of CS, with a case rate nearly double that of the national case rate.  

Health Information Organizations (HIOs) are in a unique position to make data and tools available to local public health jurisdictions (LHJs) to public health communicable disease teams for timely prevention, intervention and treatment. California law requires health care providers to report cases of syphilis to LHJs within 1 working day.  LHJs participating with an HIO are able to receive real time alerts when individuals reported with CS are seen in an emergency department or admitted to a hospital, including for labor and delivery. CS is 100% preventable with timely intervention and treatment. 

This model, successfully piloted by San Bernardino County and nonprofit HIO Manifest MedEx, allows public health to receive Admit, Transfer, Discharge (ADT) alerts for every pregnant patient with syphilis, many of whom are lost to follow up, and coordinate with the care team to ensure maternal or neonatal testing and treatment are provided.   

In this webinar, learn how counties can leverage ADT notifications and longitudinal patient records provided by nonprofit HIOs to address CS and other potential use cases to support public health goals, as AB133 and the Data Sharing Framework go into effect, encouraging state and local public health agencies to exchange health information in real-time by 2024. 

Panelists:

  • Mimi Hall, MPH, Vice President, Public Health Innovation, Manifest MedEx
  • Heather Readhead, MD, MPH Public Health Medical Officer, California Department of Public Health
  • Sara Sowko, Public Health Epidemiologist, Contra Costa Health Services, and California Association of Communicable Disease Controllers (CACDC)
  • Josh Dugas, Director, San Bernardino County Department of Public Health
  • Shadi Barfjani, MD, Senior Deputy Director, San Joaquin County Public Health Services

Register and share the link to the webinar here. We look forward to seeing you there!

Participant Bright Spot

San Bernardino Physicians Associates is one of many family-owned clinics that make up the Clinica Medica Familiar organization. Clinica Media Familiar is based in the Inland Empire and was formed to provide quality, comprehensive medical care, with bilingual personnel, in a warm, caring environment at all locations. The provider staff at San Bernardino Physicians Associates includes three physicians, two physician assistants, and one nurse practitioner.

San Bernardino Physicians Associates joined the Manifest MedEx (MX) nonprofit health data network in 2020 through the California Health Information Exchange Onboarding Program (CalHOP), which provided funding for clinics to onboard to health information exchanges.

To learn more about providers can easily access longitudinal patient medical records and save time preparing for office visits, please visit our website to read the full case study.

MX Inaugural Summit Recap

 

On September 29 - September 30, 2022, Manifest MedEx convened its inaugural health data policy-focused summit, “Evolution California: Accelerating Health Data Reform from First Mile to Last Mile!” The event was held at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture located on the waterfront of San Francisco, CA. Policy experts, health care leaders, and other community stakeholders from over 35 agencies, associations, health plans, and healthcare organizations attended and discussed the health data and infrastructure needed to support California's audacious goals across Medi-Cal, public health, value-based care, and our communities.

If you were one of the speakers or attendees who joined us those days, we appreciate you spending time with us and hope you found the event to be as informative and invigorating as we did.

Visit our website to view highlights and key insights from the inaugural summit!

News and Events

2022 CHEAC Annual Meeting

Mimi Hall, Vice President of Public Health Innovation at Manifest MedEx, participated in a panel discussion titled, "Health Equity Starts With Data," alongside Emily Chung, MPH, Public Health Director at Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency, Josh Dugas, Director at San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, and Joe Prado, Assistant Director at Fresno County Department of Public Health at the 2022 County Health Executives Association of California (CHEAC) Annual Meeting. 

This panel of experts shared their thoughts on how California can tackle health equity by planning collaboratively, modernizing data sharing, and building working health data exchanges that include partnerships across multiple sectors, including public health. They each highlighted real California examples including health data as a utility to provide insights into community conditions and target resources to address disparities as well as use cases showcasing how data sharing has been key to advancing Whole Person Care, CalAIM, and PATH efforts. 

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2022 CAHP Annual Conference

The California Association of Health Plans (CAHP) hosted its 2022 Annual Conference last week, where Manifest MedEx had the honor of participating as a Reception Sponsor. MX also partnered with Connecting for Better Health (C4BH) to host an evening cocktail reception to create an opportunity for attendees to network with each other and connect about data interoperability and collaboration in California. 

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WEDI 2022 National Conference

Elizabeth Killingsworth, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Manifest MedEx, participated in a panel discussion titled, "Solving National Problems at the Regional Level: How Health Data Utilities and Data Frameworks are Solving Gaps in Data and Supporting Patient Access" at the WEDI 2022 National Conference alongside Lisa Bari, Chief Executive Officer at Civitas Networks for Health, and Nichole Sweeney, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at CRISP, this week in Washington, DC.

Sharing data among organizations providing care and support for individual health and wellness allows for the normalization, aggregation, and streamlining of clinical data exchange, reduces costs, and creates positive trends in patient care. The panel shared emerging concepts of health data utilities and how two states: California and Maryland, are succeeding in supporting data exchange through collaboration, partnerships, and policy.

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HIEs Do Double Duty As Public Health Utilities

The concept of a health data utility formalizes the wide scope of functions many health information exchanges already deliver. And work on social determinants of health is adding to the mix.

On the heels of this year’s Civitas Networks for Health 2022 Annual Conference, a Collaboration with the DirectTrust Summit, Erica Galvez, CEO of Manifest MedEx, shared with Healthcare IT News perspectives on MX's role as public health utility, interoperability challenges, successes achieved during the pandemic and trends shaping the future for HIEs.

Read the full interview published in Healthcare IT News.

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Closing Medi-Cal’s Digital Divide Is Key To Health Equity

Because of a lack of resources, only a small portion of Medi-Cal’s primary care providers are able to share quality digital health data.

We need to address what the California Health and Human Services Agency identified as substantial gaps in the capacity to store, electronically share and use health and social service information. We need to close this digital divide that has left behind more than a third of our state’s population. 

While almost every hospital, clinic, and health plan today has digitized records, the majority are not yet sharing that electronic information with others or using shared data from others. It is health information organizations that can guide healthcare providers in this final mile of connectivity. These organizations require but do not receive dedicated public funding to connect with each other on the statewide scale that Medi-Cal demands.

Read the article by Mimi Hall, Vice President of Public Health Innovation, Manifest MedEx, and John Helvey, Executive Director, SacValley MedShare, published in CalMatters.

Network Growth

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New data sources available on MX today:

ADTs from the following 5 participants:

Tri-State Community Healthcare Center (5 locations)

CCDAs from the following 34 participants:

Altura Centers for Health (FKA Tulare Community Health Clinic)
Aria Community Health Center (22 locations)
Aspen Pediatric Clinic, Inc.
Manzoor A. Kazi Medical Associates, Inc.
S.M. Hammad Rizvi M.D. Inc. dba San Antonio Family Medical Group
Stanley H. Schwartz, M.D., Inc. (3 locations)
Tri-State Community Healthcare Center (5 locations)

Lab data from the following 67 participants:

Advanced Medical & Kidney Institute
Akhil Sharma M.D.
Allcare Family Clinic
Aparna Sharma M.D.
Arthur E. Jimenez, M.D., Inc.
Azim U. Azhand F.A.A.P.
Bear Valley Primary Care
Borrero Medical Group
Chino Pediatric Medical Group
Chorng Lii Hwang M.D.
Clinica Coachella, Inc.
Cresencia D. Banzuela, M.D., Inc.
Daniel Franco M.D., Inc.
Desert Family Practice Associates Medical Group, Inc. (2 locations)
Devada S. Moses M.D.
Dr. Halyna West Inc.
Foothill Family Medical Clinic
George N. Chidi, M.D., P.A. dba Medicross Clinic and Urgent Care
Haven Pediatrics and Adolescent Care
Health Service Alliance (3 locations)
Inscriptions Childrens Clinic
Javed Ahmad A Professional Medical Corporation

Jesus Lua M.D. Inc.
LaSalle Medical Associates (6 locations)
Lloyd K. Ito, M.D., A Professional Corp
M.D. Care Providers, Inc.
Max V. Soliguen, M.D. Inc. dba Kids First Pediatrics
Murrieta Primary Care Clinic (2 locations)
Namita Mohideen, M.D., Inc. (3 locations)
New Hope Medical Group A Professional Corporation
Oliverio Medical Corporation (2 locations)
Orangecrest Medical Group Inc.
Ramona Medical Clinic
Rancho Family Medical Group (10 locations)
Rancho Medical Clinic
Renato De La Rosa
Rosalie A. De Guzman, M.D., Inc.
S.M. Hammad Rizvi M.D. Inc. dba San Antonio Family Medical Group
Stanley H. Schwartz, M.D., Inc. (3 locations)
Swati Panse M.D. Inc.
Vien D. Doan, D.O.
Western Horizon Medical Group
William Tsai, DO, Inc.
Yousuf Sadiq M.D.

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