The Social Security Administration today divvied up $17.4 million in awarding contracts to 15 health information networks, providers and health IT firms from California to Florida. The contracts will enhance HIE networks and cut from weeks to days the time it takes SSA to adjudicate claims made by people applying for disabilities benefits, agency executives said.
The contracts extend on a nationwide scale an application SSA began testing three years ago with Virginia-based HIE MedVirginia to electronically pull health records of disability applicants from local health practices, sort them through a state health information exchange and get them rapidly into the hands of SSA adjudicators.
The grants went to organizations as dispersed as CalRHIO in San Francisco, Calif., Community Health Collaborative in Duluth, Minn., and the Memorial Hospital Foundation in Marshfield, Miss.
With the contract awards, which were funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the agency will have a much wider pool from which to draw patient records electronically, said Michael Astrue, SSA's commissioner.
"The use of health IT will dramatically improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of this process, reducing the cost of making a disability decision for both the medical community and the American taxpayer," he said in an announcement today.
Jim Borland, SSA's special advisor for health IT, said the contracts advance SSA along the same path of interoperability now being mapped by national health information policymakers.
That vision calls for "a comprehensive, interoperable electronic health record that provides all of the major medical information of an individual so that you can improve continuity of care, transitions in care, treatment, payment accuracy, and in our case, disability determinations," Borland said.
Under the new contracts, the providers and networks will use electronic health exchange standards and protocols designed to spur development of the nationwide health information network (NHIN), a secure method of exchanging electronic medical records via the Internet.
Use of the NHIN will significantly shorten the time it takes to make a disability decision, said Astrue, who added that in its work the sites in Virginia and Massachusetts, some disability decisions are now made in days instead of weeks or months.
In its venture with MedVirginia, SSA uses the Connect software suite, an open source implementation of the NHIN developed by federal healthcare agencies. SSA's Medical Evidence Gathering and Analysis through Health IT (MEGAHIT) system receives, analyzes and processes the structured data.
"This largely paper-bound workload is generally the most time-consuming part of the disability decision process," Astrue said. Social Security expects to receive more than 3.3 million applications for disability during this fiscal year (2010), 27 percent more than in fiscal 2008.
Today's announcement included awards to the following organizations:
1. Cal RHIO, San Francisco, Calif. -- $1,625,000
2. CareSpark, Kingsport, Tenn. -- $1,363,000
3. Center for Healthy Communities, Wright State University, Healthlink, Dayton, Ohio -- $999,000
4. Central Virginia Health Network/MedVirginia, Richmond, Va. - $1,139,000
5. Community Health Information Collaborative (CHIC), Duluth, Minn. -- $977,000
6. Douglas County Individual Practice Association, Roseburg, Ore. -- $502,000
7. EHR Doctors Inc., Pompano Beach, Fla. -- $1,000,000
8. HealthBridge, Cincinnati, Ohio -- $1,400,000
9. Lovelace Clinic Foundation (LCF), Albuquerque, N.M. -- $1,083,000
10. Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, Marshfield, Wi. - $998,000
11. Memorial Hospital Foundation & Memorial Hospital of Gulfport Foundation, Inc., Gulfport, Miss. - $1,100,000
12. Oregon Community Health Information Network (OCHIN), Portland, Ore. - $284,000
13. Regenstrief Institute, Inc, Indianapolis, Ind. - $350,000
14. Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Reston, Va, - $1,587,000
15. Southeastern Michigan Health Association, Detroit, Mi. - $2,988,000
