Colorado Advanced Interoperability Initiative – Making Behavioral Health Data Available to Community Providers

Important work is underway that will enable patient-managed consent to include behavioral health data in the CORHIO health information exchange. 

Innovation continues to be a driving force for CORHIO’s technology team. We have begun building new technology to integrate behavioral health data, with specific patient consent, into CORHIO’s health information exchange. This work is funded by the Colorado Advanced Interoperability Initiative grant from the Office of the National Coordinator, through the Colorado Department of Healthcare Policy and Financing.

Groundbreaking Patient Consent Model

CORHIO is partnering with FEI Systems to integrate their patient consent module, known as Consent2Share, into our system. Working in partnership with the Mental Health Center of Denver, CORHIO will pull consolidated care documents into a separate repository, designed just for behavioral health data, to be queried by providers who have been granted permission by a patient to see their behavioral health data. We expect this data to be available to providers in December 2016.

“People receiving behavioral health services have until now been on the outside looking in at the care coordination benefits health information exchange offers,” says Wes Williams, PhD, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Mental Health Center of Denver.”The Mental Health Center of Denver is excited to partner with CORHIO to provide leadership in addressing this disparity by participating in this initiative.”

This work is groundbreaking for CORHIO, and is the culmination of two years of conversations with behavioral health providers across Colorado and informed by our relationships with health information exchanges across the country. We have heard from our participants how important this data is to providing whole health care for their patients — we are looking forward to this effort and the results it will yield. CORHIO will write a white paper, in partnership with Quality Health Network (an HIE based in Grand Junction, Colorado), to share our findings, successes and challenges. That paper will be published in 2017, so stay tuned for updates on this effort.