HJAR Mar/Apr 2020

OHIT/SHARE IN 2020 12 MAR / APR 2020 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   Collection of these data can be burden- some and expensive to insurers and clinical offices. SHARE can help insurers automate the identification of patient activity and electronically transmit information to insur- ers, thus reducing in office chart audits. This service is still in development, but could be a future capability that reduces administra- tive costs and provider hassles. The Arkansas Department of Health’s (ADH) network of Local Health Units (LHU) is now using SHARE. There are 93 clinics across the state, including at least one in every county in the state. SHARE will give local health unit providers access to a vari- ety of test results and medical records, as well as discharge summaries from outside hospitals and specialty clinics within their Greenway EMR System. OHIT also works with the health country to identify emerging best practices such as quality analytics and population health reporting. Arkansas participates in the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) that is working to share patient information across state lines. Arkansas’s HIE is currently connected to the eHealth Exchange, which is the national approach to interoperable health informa- tion exchange. This level of connectivity promotes the exchange of information at the federal level, which includes the Social Security Administration and the Veteran’s Administration. As a result, Arkansas doc- tors can now access the records of patients who were hospitalized visiting hundreds of miles away in another part of the country. 2018 ushered in managed care for higher risk Medicaid beneficiaries with behavioral health and developmental disabilities. Many of these patients had received inefficient fragmented care because of their complex clinical presentations. SHARE is connected to all three Behavioral Health PASSEs (i.e., Empower Healthcare, Arkansas Total Care, and Summit Community Care), and sends them daily reports on new emergency room visits and hospitalizations of their enroll- ees. This data transmission facilitates timely care coordination activities that manage new clinical issues of these complicated patients. For example, one PASSE achieved a substantial reduction in emergency room utilization of their beneficiaries through effi- cient care coordination case management. SHARE is increasingly valuable to com- mercial insurers. National entities such as Medicare and health care accredita- tion agencies require reporting by third party payers on quality of care measures.