Justin's Blog

 Archive for the ‘Health Information Exchange’ Category

New Customers of Therap will occasionally ask us to sign the provider’s drafted or created HIPAA Business Associate Agreements or similar documents. These Business Associate Agreements have been developed by attorneys across the United States and the legal language and content does very significantly from provider to provider. Many providers are unaware that the Therap User Agreement does already contain a complete Business Associate Agreement, which has been developed and reviewed and agreed to by hundreds of agencies and states governments. We are unable to negotiate, and revise separate Business Associate Agreements for each provider agency.

Agency Customers and Users of Therap Services sign several agreements with Therap as part of their initial use of Therap. These cover a range of topics including a HIPAA Compliance Agreement and a Business Associate Agreement.

These documents were drafted by our counsel partly to help ensure compliance with federal, HIPAA, HITECH and ARRA regulations for Therap and customers of Therap.

We believe that our legal agreements serve as required Business Associate Agreements and cover the points both required and relevant to the services we provide.

Our pricing and structure is based on agencies using our legal agreement. Many agencies have asked us to sign their own business associate agreements, and many of these would need legal and wording changes to comply with the actual facts of how our electronic documentation system operates.

There would be legal and operational costs to Therap for reviewing and negotiating individual agency legal agreements. Therap currently serves more than 500 agencies, each of which could theoretically have its own agreement and request legal review.

If agencies feel that our legal agreements are missing legally required HIPAA or Business Associate language – we would be happy to discuss. If agencies want Therap to review and/or sign their business associate agreements we cannot do that as part of our current pricing and service structure.

My testimony today was followed shortly after wards by this by Stan Soby of Oak Hill.

Testimony before the Human Services Committee
Regarding H. B. No. 5354 (Raised)
An Act to Provide Incentives for Hospitals to Adopt Electronic Health Records.

Good morning, Senator Doyle, Representative Walker and members of the Human Services Committee. I am Stan Soby, Vice President for Community Programs at Oak Hill, a non-profit community provider of services to over 500 people of all ages with developmental and other disabilities, located here in Hartford and in over 90 locations in 58 Connecticut towns.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak in support of H. B. No. 5354 (Raised) An Act to Provide Incentives for Hospitals to Adopt Electronic Health Records. I am also here to ask that you be as inclusive as possible in your definition of “professionals who are meaningful electronic health record users.” This is not just a hospital or physician’s office issue; community providers of services to people with disabilities collect and provide important health information that is utilized in hospital and medical office settings.

Oak Hill has made the commitment to its consumers and their guardians and families in our mission statement to “set the standard” in the delivery of supports and services. The use of electronic health records has become the standard. In fact, three states, Delaware, North Dakota and Montana, have already mandated that all providers statewide use the system we are using today. We also believed an electronic records system was necessary to be able to respond to and survive the movement in the Department of Developmental Services to an attendance–based, fee-for-services payment system.

Oak Hill spent over a year defining its needs and vetting potential vendors. Having selected a vendor, we spent months designing an implementation plan and educating our program staff in the system’s use, going live on July 1, 2009. Our outcomes include having better communication and better documentation, which lead to better service, more accurate billing information which improves our reimbursement capture and 360˚ accountability within the agency. Our plans include providing guardians with user accounts to access their loved ones records directly.

Community providers also need to be included in the definition of “health care facilities” referenced in Section 2(b) of H.B. 5354. Thanks to the assistance of Congressman John Larson’s office, Oak Hill and our vendor have been included in eHealthCT’s Health Information Exchange pilot. We want our consumers to be able to fully benefit from our use of an electronic health record system by having vital health information we collect be readily available electronically in a hospital emergency department or a medical specialist’s office. We are responsible for conveying that information about the people we support, which we now do by printing out information from our system.

This has not been an inexpensive undertaking. Our vendor uses a subscription model and houses the data, so we pay an annual fee for the service. We provided two hours of introductory training for each of our some 1,000 hourly-paid employees and to our 190 supervisory and clinical employees. While we have a strong information technology infrastructure already in place, we needed to give our employees the means to use the electronic records system efficiently and effectively, adding laptops for locations and upgrading our wireless routers.

While we are a large enough agency that we have been able to cover the cost amortized over a five year period through not refilling two supervisory positions, not many agencies could do the same. Given that funding is available through the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, we encourage you to take the broadest approach possible and include community providers in your eligibility criteria. Thank you.

Today I had the honour and privilege to testify before the State of Connecticut’s Human Services Committee.

I was talking to the committee about “AN ACT TO PROVIDE INCENTIVES FOR HOSPITALS TO ADOPT ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS“

Basically the proposed bill encourages the state to obtain ARRA funding for Hospitals implementing Electronic Health Records.

My point, quite simply, was that the state should make sure that these funds are available to developmental disability providers.

My submission was as follows:

Re: Raised Bill No. 5354: AN ACT TO PROVIDE INCENTIVES FOR HOSPITALS TO ADOPT ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS.

Therap Services is a company headquartered in Waterbury, Connecticut that provides commercial off the shelf web-based applications to developmental disability providers and government departments across North America.

Therap’s system allows for documentation and communication surrounding individuals with developmental and other disabilities that meets requirements set by HIPAA, ARRA, and HITECH for security, accountability, and availability.

Therap started working with providers in Connecticut in 2003 and now has over 40,000 users in 43 states and provinces across the US and Canada. Therap has been mandated for statewide use by both government and private providers in Delaware, Montana, and North Dakota.

In Connecticut, Therap allows users to generate state mandated forms for incident reporting, emergency planning, Medicaid billing as well as documentation of a services provided.

Therap is participating (in conjunction with Oak Hill and Hartford Hospital) in the eHealth Connecticut Health Information Exchange). This will greatly enhance communication between medical providers and agencies supporting people with disabilities.

Therap has shown the ability to save providers at least 3 to 5% of their annual budget through the efficiencies that the system brings in terms of enhanced communication, reduced driving, higher staff efficiency, and reduction in paper and associated costs such as photocopying.

When looking at “eligible professionals” within this bill, The State of Connecticut should give priority to recognizing the significant impact of encouraging developmental disability providers (as well as the Department of Developmental Services) to adopt electronic records.

More information about Therap Services can be found on our website: www.TherapServices.net or by contacting:

Justin M. Brockie, Chief Operating Officer
Therap Services, LLC,
562 Watertown Avenue, Suite 3, Waterbury, CT 06708
Email: justin@TherapServices.net
Tel: (203) 596-7553, Fax: (203) 757-5116

If you are aware of similar proposals in your state, I would encourage you to get involved.

:: Justin ::

As you may have have noticed from reading our Customer Support Blog a team of senior Therap developers are at the HL7 Conference in Arizona.

There is some really exciting stuff going on which will not only let you get more from your data in Therap, but also make sure that the data becomes more useful by being able to share it with hospitals and doctors.

Some of the possibilities ahead are really exciting, and while IBM are making very pretty commercials about this stuff, we are just concentrating on getting it done!

There will be a lot of discussion about this stuff at the Provider Admin Conference.  Don’t miss out!

By the way, if you’re not sure what HL7 is and half an hour to spare, this is a really nice introduction.

If you just have a couple of minutes, watch this:

How does HL7 work? from iNTERFACEWARE.COM on Vimeo.

:: Justin ::