Medicaid Medication History Project
The Florida Center for Health Information and Policy Analysis is exploring the opportunity of providing an interface between Gold Standard and the Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) in Florida to provide a display of medication history to treating physicians for Medicaid patients by way of the RHIO portal. The data display will be used by Medicaid physicians to furnish services to Medicaid beneficiaries. It will be used by treating physicians, providing the drug therapy history of patients for diagnostic decisions.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration’s Medicaid program has provided point of care medication history information to Medicaid providers since 2003 through a contract with Gold Standard, Inc. in Tampa. Gold Standard deployed eMPOWERx as its e-prescribing software platform, which is now available for use on PDAs, desktop and tablet computers.
eMPOWERx provides a 100 day medication history for Medicaid patients at the point of care, offers ready utilization and compliance review, information about coverage and restrictions and the Medicaid Preferred Drug List. The eMPOWERx prescription program employs clinical pharmacology and clinical report tools, empowering clinicians to screen a prescription for adverse effects, detect potential allergic responses and screen for appropriate dosage, which reduces medication errors before they occur. Clinicians can also detect over-use or under-use of therapies.
eMPOWERx offers full electronic prescribing features that allow providers to write prescriptions from a desktop computer or PDA. The program prompts for the patient’s last used pharmacy or sends the e-prescription to any pharmacy of the patient’s choice for dispensing.
Proposal to Provide Gold Standard eMPOWERx Medication History to Florida RHIOS
The Florida Center for Health Information and Policy Analysis, Office of Health Information Technology is exploring the opportunity of providing an interface between Gold Standard and the Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) in Florida to provide a display of medication history to treating physicians for Medicaid patients by way of the RHIO portal. Providing this data display will improve the quality of patient care for treating physicians by providing the drug therapy history of patients for improved diagnostic decisions.
The data display will also enhance the value of the information provided by the RHIO portal by adding an additional information utility that can be integrated into the RHIO data display. Florida Medicaid pharmacy claims data are already used by the Tampa Bay Regional Health Information Organization. This proposal proposes that the same data interface could be used by Florida’s other RHIOs.
Gold Standard Proposal for Providing eMPOWERx Services to Florida RHIOs
Gold Standard has proposed giving the Regional Health Information Organizations two options for receiving eMPOWERx utilities: 1) a data display of medication history provided to physicians and 2) the ability to offer e-prescribing services using eMPOWERx over their web portals.
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In the first scenario, upon receiving an electronic request from the RHIO’s system, Gold Standard will use a web service to provide the Medicaid medication history on a particular patient in the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) standard format to the requesting RHIO’s system. This data would only be provided to the RHIO for transmission to a treating provider for display at point of care. The data would be sent real-time via the web service on a patient-by-patient request basis, and not in batch. No data would be stored at the RHIO. |
In Gold Standard’s second scenario, eMPOWERx would be linked to a RHIO’s system to allow a physician to utilize eMPOWERx features and benefits including Medicaid medication history and clinical decision support such as drug-drug interaction alerts. The registered provider at the point of care would log in using his or her current RHIO portal credentials, which would function as a single sign-on with the Gold Standard authentication. The eMPOWERx website may be co-branded for the RHIO. There will be a cost of connection charged by Gold Standard for accessing the Medicaid medication history, which will be determined as the project moves forward. These charges will be kept to a minimum for the benefit of the RHIOs.
Single Sign-on, Authentication and Access Control to eMPOWERx Medication History
There are two issues of critical importance to the success of delivering an eMPOWERx data display through the RHIO portals: 1) single sign-on to the web portal and 2) access control of eMPOWERx users. The single sign-on is important to maintain efficiency and ease of access to physicians who do not want multiple logins. The access control is critical to the security of the e-prescribing system, and is required to ensure that only Medicaid physicians access the data on their patients. Access to the Gold Standard e-prescribe software will require two-factor authentication to ensure that only authorized Medicaid physicians can access the patient records. One way that two factor authentication can be implemented through the RHIO portal is to use the single sign-on and a second personal identification number for access to the medication history, though other methods can also be employed. |
