Government Technology - September 2008 - (Page 33)

Rooted in Negotiation The Health Passport is rooted in SB 6 from the 2005 state Legislature. The bill is loaded with measures to improve programs under the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS). The bill included a mandate that foster children’s health care be streamlined under a single management program. It also contained a “Medical Passport” section covering information the electronic passport should contain. Once the bill passed, the HHSC held sessions with the DFPS, foster care providers, advocacy groups, health-care providers and technology companies, to draw up a blueprint of the passport. Yvonne Sanchez, senior health policy analyst of the HHSC, said the Health Passport that’s online today is the product of a long negotiation among all stakeholders. “Those were really intense sessions because we have two different agencies, different providers. Everyone has different needs, different things they wanted to get out of the Health Passport,” Sanchez said. “Ultimately we were just steering the process, trying to come up with a design and a model that would really work to benefit the users.” Texas received a $4 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to build the system, as part How it Works The Health Passport culls foster childrens’ medical information from disparate sources into a central Web-based interface that gives designated individuals access to the data. Foster Care Statistics According to the most recent statistics released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there were an estimated 510,000 children in foster care in the country as of Sept. 30, 2006: • Forty-six percent of them lived with foster families to whom they were unrelated. Twenty-four percent lived with a foster family of a relative. The remainder were placed in group homes, institutions and other living arrangements. • Children in foster care stayed an average of 28 months. • Approximately 129,000 children were awaiting adoption. l dica Mepanies Com te Stacies en Ag ers ition ract P Health Passport n rdia Gua tor Doc ical Med nter se Con of a larger push to advance health-care IT countrywide. In March 2007, the HHSC awarded the blanket contract for foster child health-care management to Superior HealthPlan, operated by St. Louis-based Centene Corp. The management solutions that Superior developed under the contract, including the Health Passport, formed a new program called Star Health. Superior’s Health Passport program manager, Sloane Cody, said there was a short learning curve because the company was already managing parts of Texas’ Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance programs. “We’re lucky — we had worked with a lot of the vendors before and had a relationship with the community we cover in Texas,” said Cody. “We were lucky that SB 6 gave a fair amount of detail and the contract we went into offered a lot of detail.” To build the passport, Superior assembled groups of four or five full-time staff members to handle specific project areas: data interface management, access security, integrating whole assessment forms and reports, demographics, and integrating the child’s and caregiver’s personal information. To build the framework technology, Superior contracted with Cerner Corp., a Kansas City, Mo.-based health IT provider whose Tennessee Medicaid management system became a model for the Texas Health Passport. Cody said the biggest challenges Superior faced were data interface management and handling transactions between the passport and the 12 medical data sources. Superior’s data warehouse and experience with similar problems were key to building the system. “It took a lot of design sessions,” Cody said, “but we’re lucky we were able to leverage a lot of processes and exchange methods we already had in place.” Stacey Pogue, policy analyst at the center for Public Policy Priorities, said that while security and access are of concern, Health Passport is a resourceful tool. The display for each passport begins on a demographics page that displays basic personal data, such as name and date of birth. Crucial for foster children, it also includes listings for medical contacts, such as physicians and personal contacts, like their guardians, caseworkers and medical consenters. “This is one way we can clearly document who is involved with these children’s lives across the board,” Cody said. “It’s really a good way to be sure 33 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - September 2008

Government Technology - September 2008 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Up Close Fork in the Road On Time and On Target On the Record, Off the Charts Government’s Greatest Asset? Easy Access Finding the Money Security in the Wireless World The Case for Mobility Spectrum Products Two Cents signal:noise Digital Communities Contents A New Government Paradigm News is Now Transformation Web 2.0 Style Protecting Community Media Thinking Regionally Government at La-Z-Boy Speed

Government Technology - September 2008

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