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Dear Michigan Stakeholder,
On behalf of the Michigan Health Information Technology ("Health IT") Commission and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), I invite you and your organization to be part of a statewide engagement process to inform and help prioritize strategies and tactics for inclusion in Michigan’s 5-Year Health IT Roadmap - a guide we expect to be completed over the next 12-15 months with broad stakeholder participation throughout the process. This roadmap will help shape the future of:
- Health and human services IT functionality for public and private entities across the state;
- Data availability and sharing;
- Digital tools; and
- Technical assistance for patients and providers.
Michigan is overdue for an update to the last health IT strategic plan, the 2006 Conduit to Care Report. Nonetheless, the 2006 plan served Michigan well. It has been used as a model for other states and was leveraged more than once in successful federal grant applications, helping to bring tens of millions in health transformation funds into our state. A refresh of Michigan’s roadmap will build on the 2006 report, setting a vision for expanded data services to advance Michigan’s whole-person health improvement goals and reducing health disparities using innovative digital health solutions. We expect that this next roadmap will help Michigan secure future public and private funding for IT and data sharing projects, overcome collective action dilemmas to better share data for care coordination and patient support, bridge divides between health and human services to serve the whole person, ease paperwork and reporting burdens on providers, and allow patients better access to their own information to manage their health.
Courtesy of grantmaking by the Michigan Health Endowment Fund1, MDHHS and the Health IT Commission are supported in this effort by a consulting team at CedarBridge Group LLC (“CedarBridge”). CedarBridge and MDHHS will be offering a number of opportunities to provide your input on the roadmap, and we hope that you, your members, and your clients will speak up. These forums, surveys, and interviews are designed to capture information about the current use of health IT and data exchange services in Michigan; they also will document the desires of stakeholders for future health IT functionality, data availability, digital tools, and technical assistance.
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Virtual Forums: CedarBridge will be hosting a series of 16 virtual engagement sessions throughout the fall on a variety of topics such as care coordination, racial disparities, COVID-19 response, and behavioral health. These sessions will provide an opportunity to collect input from stakeholders far and wide across Michigan on using data from health IT systems to address business needs as well as the needs of individuals they serve. To access a schedule and register for forums, please refer to the “Connecting and Innovating for Better Health” promotional handout. To stay up to date on the progress of the health IT roadmap development, please refer to the MDHHS Health IT Commission web page.
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Electronic Surveys: CedarBridge also will work through many of the Michigan healthcare-related associations to disseminate electronic surveys among their members.
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Key informant interviews: Over the course of the fall, CedarBridge will conduct key informant interviews with leaders across Michigan’s healthcare and social service ecosystem to round out the discovery phase of roadmap development. Where possible, they will also attend association or stakeholder meetings to gather feedback from existing groups.
A draft of roadmap recommendations will be presented to the Health IT Commission in Spring 2021, and the final 5-Year Health IT Roadmap is expected to be approved by HITC in late summer 2021. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, all stakeholder forums and key informant interviews will occur in virtual settings.
To kick off this ambitious initiative, we invite you to participate in a two-question mini survey on health IT, data exchange, and the pandemic. We request that all survey responses be received before end of day on August 31st, 2020.
I encourage you to contribute your thoughts and participate in the discussions, and we thank you in advance for your time. If you have any questions about this activity, please direct all inquiries to miroadmap@cedarbridgegroup.com.
We appreciate your partnership and dedication to continuous improvement of healthcare in Michigan.
Stay well.
Sincerely,
Sarah Esty
MDHHS Designee to the Health IT Commission
Senior Deputy Director for Policy and Planning, MDHHS
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