New York State’s mental health system serves 900,000+ individuals yearly, operating psychiatric centers and regulating 4,500+ programs operated by local governments and nonprofit agencies, and is charged with informing state government policy on mental health issues. The Office of Mental Health’s (OMH) available data was not near real-time or comprehensive for data on crisis services provided in EDs and IP settings and relies on manual reporting from facilities for certain data. OMH wanted HIE data to improve demographics and timeliness, as well as reduce manual data reporting. This partnership of Bronx RHIO, Healthix, and OMH resulted in the daily submission of data to OMH for consolidation with their other data sources for use in policy analysis and program evaluation and reducing mandatory reporting requirements. The partners experienced a variety of challenges in implementing this data aggregation project for public health. We will share the challenges and learnings with the attendees.
1. the process of a successful partnership between a state public health agency and HIEs to leverage hospital data for regulatory reporting,
2. challenges in carving out state reporting and mitigation requirements,
3. how two different HIEs with different infrastructures collaborated to create a common ground for reporting, and
4. OMH's perspective on how HIE data can be combined with other available data to support program evaluation and policy development.