(Nov. 2, 2016, Portland, OR) – Patients are one step closer to directing how their individual health data flows, and a Portland consulting firm is helping lead the charge. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced today that CedarBridge Group LLC has been awarded a phase one funding prize of $5,000, and will participate in the second phase of the Move Health Data Forward Challenge (MHDFC).
Under the provisions of the America COMPETES Act, MHDFC is a nationwide competition to incentivize development of solutions that will allow individuals to authorize the movement of their health data electronically. With this news, CedarBridge and their partner, San Jose based HIT services and product technology developer Stella Technology, Inc. will set to work on prototyping the revolutionary new app, CareApproveTM.
CareApprove is a smart phone app that allows patients to grant—and revoke— permission for providers to access, send, or receive health information electronically. CareApprove is designed to put patients in charge of how their health data is shared among their providers, which is particularly important for data related to behavioral health, substance use disorders or sexually transmitted infections. Due to complex federal and state requirements for collecting patient consent to share health information, many healthcare organizations simply choose to lock down sensitive health data, even when patients want their providers to have a full picture of their health.
The CareApprove app will allow patients to determine whether their health data is made available to all healthcare providers they have a medical relationship with, or released on a case-by-case basis for treatment or care coordination.
As a strategy to achieve ONC’s goals for expanding consumer-mediated health information exchange, the MHDFC competition requires using the Health Relationship Trust (HEART) privacy and security specifications in the app design. The CareApprove app incorporates the HEART requirements with rigorously compliant security. By giving the power of data-sharing permissions to patients, CareApprovewill resolve many of the vexing legal questions facing healthcare organizations that store and share health records.
“We are excited that CareApprove has caught the attention of the ONC evaluators and is advancing to the next round of this innovative competition,” said Carol Robinson, Principal and founder of CedarBridge Group. “Managing patient consent among providers is one of the toughest challenges we see, and often, critical information about patients’ conditions is hidden from their trusted provider. CareApprove not only solves this problem from a legal standpoint, but also engages patients more in their own care decisions.”
“The power of the CareApprove app is its flexibility,” said Jim Younkin, CedarBridge Group Chief Technology Officer. “We’ve designed the app to work with common technology standards so that CareApprove can be implemented easily using query-based exchange, or with DIRECT secure messaging protocols.”
“Stella Technology is delighted to work with the CedarBridge Group on this innovative solution to one of health information exchange’s toughest problems,” said Salim Kizaraly, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Founder of Stella Technology. “The system we’re creating can be connected with a state or regional health information exchange, or it can operate independently with a provider’s office.”
Phase 2 teams have until mid-January to prepare an app prototype with a video demonstration, and an implementation plan for a project pilot. Phase 2 of the MHDFC challenge will provide $20,000 for up to five finalists to prove “real life” value through pilot demonstrations by May 1, 2017. Two Phase 3 winners will each receive $50,000, based on the judging team’s assessment of implementation viability for the winning solutions. ----
CedarBridge Group, LLC, is a specialty consulting firm providing strategic advice, tactical services, and technical solutions to accelerate health transformation. CedarBridge serves diverse clients across public sectors, including federal, state, and county agencies; and private sectors, ranging from Fortune 50 company Intel Corporation to small healthcare practices and emerging technology firms. CedarBridge is certified as an 8(a) company by the Small Business Administration.
Stella Technology, Inc. is a leading provider of integration and collaboration solutions for the next generation, “healthcare-connected” network. Stella Technology’s team of industry-recognized professionals have designed, implemented and run some of the nation’s leading health information exchanges (HIE) and health information technology projects (HIT) for the past eighteen years.
