The Missouri Health Information Organization (MHIO) a new public-private partnership is slated to receive $13.8 million in federal funds over the next four years to support and develop a statewide HIE. The state HIO plans to implement technical services in 2011 and make services available to providers throughout the state.
Missouri is going to develop an HIE with qualified organizations to provide the core infrastructure and services to providers. These organizations may be a variety of organizations or networks that have relationships with or provide services to providers and may be but are not limited to provider networks, regional HIOs, rural health centers, laboratories, pharmacies, private, non-provider networks, the Medicaid network (Mo HealthNet) or Missouri State Employee Health Plans.
To implement the HIE, a phased rollout approach will be used:
• Phase 1 is designed to meet ONC requirements and implement technologies needed to support sustainable HIE across the state by June 2011
• Phase 2 is to leverage the technologies and expand them to meet key use cases to support anticipated meaningful use requirements by October 2012
• Phase 3 will use future technologies to support use cases to promote sustainability and meet market demands by 2012 and provide for future demands
An RFP for technical services was released on November 12th for vendors to partner with the MHIO to design, implement, and operate the statewide HIE platform. The MHIO is going to select the vendor to help provide the HIE throughout the state and NHIN.
Issuing the RFP is the first step to selecting the technical services partner. The process for the vendors includes submitting written proposals, providing customer references and site visits, demonstrating products and services, and attending technical services partner workshops.
The MHIO timeline includes operating in phases:
• Phase 1—MHIO would launch technical services for securely routing patient care summaries and lab results
• Phase 2—MHIO will provide additional services such as sending patient care summaries to physician’s EHRs, incorporate lab results into the EHR, provide lab ordering, be able to query patient history, retrieve medication history, provide a PHR, and send info for quality reporting, to disease registries and for public health reporting
The technical services partners answering the RFP’s scope of work must address the needs in Phase 1 and Phase 2 in their response. However, since vendors will be entering into an ongoing collaborative relationship with the state, they need to be able to identify and be aware of future services as needed.
The MHIO would also like the technical services partners selected to be familiar with the broadband and telehealth initiatives already existing in the state and to consider ways in which these initiatives may be used to further proposed solutions.
Missouri has several large initiatives underway:
• Missouri Telehealth Network at http://telehealth.muhealth.org/index.html was one of the nation’s first public-private partnerships in telehealth and provides care to underserved areas, provides education opportunities for healthcare providers, furthers efforts related to disaster preparedness, and provides research opportunities to clinicians studying via telehealth. By the end of 2009, the network had over 175 endpoints in 51 Missouri counties and today this number is expected to grow to 200 endpoints in 56 counties
• MoBroadbandNOW at http://transform.mo.gov/broadband is a private-public partnership launched in 2009 with the goal to expand broadband accessibility to 95 percent of the total population of the state
Go to http://dss.mo.gov/hie/action/pdf/2010/rfp_11122010.pdf for information on the RFP. For other information, go to http://dss.mo.gov/hie/action/index.shtml.
Proposals are to be submitted by December 10th. For more information on the RFP, email Mark Belanger at mbelanger@maehc.org or call (781) 434-7889.
