HITEQ Resources & Events

As HRSA BPHC's UDS+ and other granular data reporting programs approach, health centers are at varying levels of awareness and readiness. The HITEQ Center offered a virtual office hours series to discuss the following:

• The mechanisms of future reporting via bulk FHIR submission
• The future state where health centers are ready for UDS+ and other patient level reporting.
• Readiness processes for future reporting via bulk FHIR submission, including strong data governance, standardized documentation, and mapping. 
• Health IT and data characteristics of future-focused healt
   

Patient engagement through electronic health apps are one solution to the need for timely and ongoing patient support. Join us to discuss a program to support mental health through an integrated behavioral health model using a mental health app at Cambridge Health Alliance. The session discussed how apps can address gaps in mental health care, the lessons learned in effective implementation of use of a mental health app in a safety-net clinic, and provide a rubric for evaluating health apps for your patients and use in your mental health service.

The Integration Framework, developed by Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), provides guidance to health care systems, states, and health information technology (IT) vendors to support successful project execution, management and communications for Health IT integrations. This Framework is based on the project’s learnings from Prescription Drug Monitoring Program-Electronic Health Record (PDMP-EHR) Integration and electronic Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Implementation. The intended audience for this Framework includes health care systems preparing to integrate their EHR with the state PDMP, as well as PDMP administrators interested in providing PDMP-EHR integrations to health care systems in their state. The learnings from this project may also be useful to organizations undertaking other Health IT integrations. This Framework is supplemented by the PDMP-EHR Integration Toolkit that provides detailed guidance and templates for specific phases of integration.

Health centers are interested in implementing remote patient monitoring (RPM), but are struggling to do so efficiently and completely because of policy, social, and technology barriers combined with staffing and time pressure. To support health centers in the strategic implementation of RPM, the HITEQ Center launched a free learning collaborative -- Health Center Remote Patient Monitoring and Digital Health.  This learning collaborative provided participating health centers a series of four structured virtual learning sessions. 

During the series participants engaged with subject matter experts and their colleagues in peer-to-peer learning and discussion. Topics included: defining the problem that RPM could address; determining the appropriate RPM technology solution; set-up and implementation of RPM technology and processes within an organization; and evaluation, sustainability and scaling RPM to ensure efficiency and value. Participants gained information on key considerations for each of these components of implementation of RPM.

This session sought to motivate and educate Health Center staff and leadership on current critical cybersecurity threats, concepts, and methods for the defense of health data. A panel of cybersecurity experts addressed questions on how to best protect the health center from both internal and external network leaks, through malware such as ransomware, and through physical means on-site.