CalRHIO -- a California initiative to create a statewide health information network -- on Monday said it is providing four state safety net health data exchanges with up to $340,000 to strengthen or expand their current networks, the San Francisco Business Times reports.
The funding was made available through a grant from Blue Shield of California Foundation, and the four recipients of the funds are the:
- Alliance Medical Center in Healdsburg;
- Community Health Partnership in Santa Clara;
- San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium; and
- Tehachapi Valley Health Care District (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 8/20).
The projects in Healdsburg, Santa Clara and Tehachapi address electronic access to clinical data from local hospitals. The San Francisco and Santa Clara projects also deal with electronic specialty referrals for the safety net population, and the Healdsburg project focuses on electronic access to lab results and orders (Pizzi,
Healthcare IT News, 8/20).
CalRHIO's Chief Technology Officer Melanie Allison said the networks are "laboratories for learning" as the organization continues to develop a $300 million statewide exchange.
Molly Coye, one of CalRHIO's founding board members and president and CEO of the Health Technology Center, said CalRHIO hopes to have the system's backbone in place in about 18 months and to complete the exchange in two to three years.
An advisory group that included representatives from public and rural hospitals and community clinics selected grant recipients from 12 submissions through a request for proposal process, the
Business Times reports (
San Francisco Business Times, 8/20).