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“We are laser focused on lowering the cost of health care for Colorado families,” said Polis. “Technology in health care is a big piece of lowering costs and this funding will go a long way toward implementing the Health IT Roadmap and streamlining the industry,” he added.
The governor related that his state’s health IT investments are the result of ongoing public and private collaboration. The multi-year CMS program will provide the state with $9 of federal funding for every $1 of state funding through September 2021.
“The state of Colorado is working on innovative and effective ways to lower health care costs, and we support the continued implementation of the Colorado Health IT Roadmap as one of the enabling means toward that end. The approval of our federal funding match is crucial in enhancing foundational Health IT infrastructure, data governance, and harmonizing efforts throughout Colorado,” said Dianne Primavera, lieutenant governor and director of the Office of Saving People Money on Health Care.
The health IT infrastructure investment effort is being led by the Office of eHealth Innovation and the eHealth Commission.
“In addition to reducing health care costs, access to accurate and timely health information can truly save lives. When individuals and families deal with emergency health needs the last thing they remember is the name of their primary care physician, allergies, or their medications. This funding ensures this information flows to the right individual at the right time-ultimately preventing duplicate tests and procedures and improving the health of Coloradans ” said Carrie Paykoc, interim director of the Governor’s Office of eHealth Innovation.
Colorado Helath IT Roadmap Lays Out Path Forward
In the Colorado Health IT Roadmap, the state government pledges to investigate, develop, and implement approaches to optimize its health IT technical architecture.
“With the massive and ever-increasing amount of digital (health) information, an information architecture is essential to ensure that people can access – and trust – the information they need when and where they need it,” the roadmap explained.
“Having a complete and well documented health information technical architecture will enable the state to make effective decisions about which projects to pursue and the technology or products to use in the implementation,” it added.
The roadmap related that a statewide health information technical architecture would include the characteristics of an enterprise information architecture, but it would be focused on healthcare IT. It would encompass common policies, procedures, and technical approaches that both support and promote the increased use of healthcare IT.
The roadmap set a goal of developing a statewide logical technical architectural model that improves how health IT in the state is capture, managed, and disseminated.
The state also pledged to develop and support approaches that lead to ubiquitous, redundant, reliable, and affordable broadband access for healthcare organizations and consumers. It committed to provide broadband access for all of the state’s residents by 2020.
“It will take continued vision, leadership, and commitment to leverage Colorado’s current assets, while building the new capabilities required for the future,” the roadmap concluded.
