MN e-Health Update

Minnesota e-Health Update for the Week of January 23, 2012

 

Minnesota

Last Week to Apply for Minnesota HIE Connectivity Grants
The deadline for the 2011 Minnesota e-Health Connectivity Grant Program has been extended until January 31, 2011. This grant program is designed to address unmet needs related to health information exchange for qualifying clinics, hospitals and pharmacies.

Initially, the deadline for applications was December 31, 2011, but that has been extended until January 31, 2012. Grant awards range up to $10,000 and will be reviewed and evaluated on a first come, first served basis as they are received by January 31, 2012. Visit the 2011 MN e-Health Connectivity for HIE Grant Program webpage for more details including the grant guidance, grant application, FAQs and details on the grants awarded thus far. To date, 27 grants have been awarded for a total of $ 385,782.

Need Help Assessing, Planning, Implementing, Managing Projects or Researching Best Practices for your Health IT systems?
Normandale Community College MN Health IT (MnHIT) students are earning certificates as Implementation Support Specialists, Health IT Trainers, Clinician/Practitioner Consultants and Workflow Redesign Specialists. The students already have six to eight years of health care experience and/or IT experience. To set up an internship with one of these students, contact Sunny Ainley, Associate Dean, at 952-358-8806 or sunny.ainley@normandale.edu.

 

Did you know…

In Minnesota, 51% of ambulatory clinics and 54% of hospitals are capable of electronically submitting data from the EHR to the immunization registry (MIIC).

Source: Minnesota Health Information Exchange Brief. January 2012.

 

National

New, Free Online HIT Tutorials from the AMA
The American Medical Association recently launched a new resource: an online tutorial on health information technology. Objectives of the resource include: provide guidance on how to perform workflow analysis, and demonstrate how you might better use HIT. The target audience for this program is physicians and practice staff in small practices who are faced with decisions regarding health IT.

 

Free Webinar: “Guiding CIOs Through a Changing Healthcare System with Health Information Exchange” 

To help healthcare CIOs make the complex decisions required to develop HIE, CHIME and eHI collaborated to create the HIE Guide for CIOs. On February 8, 2012, CIOs will share their experiences building HIE at their organizations as they discuss the recommendations of the guidebook.

 

Presenters include a Minnesota hospital CIO:

• Joanne Sunquist, Chief Information Officer
  Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC), Minneapolis MN

 When: Wednesday February 8, 2012, 2:00-3:30pm CST

Register for this webinar  

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This weekly update is intended to provide health related professionals with a Minnesota perspective on the e-health related news, and highlight some things you may want to think about now.

 

We welcome any feedback or suggestions you would like to offer on how we can improve our communications in the future. Please send any comments you have to MN.eHealth@state.mn.us.

 

The Minnesota e-Health Initiative is a public-private collaborative whose vision is to accelerate the adoption and use of electronic health records and other health information technology in order to improve health care quality, increase patient safety, reduce health care costs and improve public health. It is guided by a statewide advisory committee with 25 representatives from interested and affected stakeholders in health information technology.