Community Health Center Association of Connecticut

Overview

Incorporated in 1989, the Community Health Center Association of Connecticut (CHCACT) is a not-for-profit service organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting the clinical and administrative operations of its member community health centers across Connecticut.  CHCACT’s 16 Federally Qualified Health Centers  (FQHC’s) and “look-alikes” serve one of every ten Connecticut residents, providing over a million medical, dental and behavioral health visits each year by people from all over Connecticut. Community health centers provide easily accessible and affordable health care and its providers offer comprehensive, family-oriented, skilled medical, dental and social services to the people who need them.

SMC has helped CHCACT and its member organizations adopt and use healthcare information technology to improve the quality and efficiency of services they provide.

• As subcontractor to eHealthConnecticut, which from 2010 through 2016 served as Connecticut’s federally funded Regional Extension Center (REC), SMC helped 14 health centers maximize their use of electronic health records to achieve the clinical and financial objectives tied to the Meaningful Use Program.
• Through that same REC contract, SMC created a special project to utilize popHealth, an open source, flexible data extraction tool to enhance the Center’s ability to extract data, produce other reports or data feeds for Uniform Data Set (UDS), Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH), Department of Public Health (DPH), or other reporting needs
• Through CHCACT’s HRSA funded HCCN grant, since 2015 SMC has been contracted to build on the success of the popHealth project to extract and normalize the clinical data from member EHRs and to collaboratively build a data warehouse and reporting analytics with comingled claims and clinical data.
• Through CHCACT’s CMS funded TCPI (Transforming Clinical Practices Initiative) Cooperative Agreement, as subcontractor to eHealthConnecticut, SMC built a multi-layered data reporting tool and portal to capture and display key performance indicators that provides valuable information on the clinical quality and financial progress tracked through this program. In addition, SMC staff works side by side with CHCACT staff to provide assistance and guidance in the area of workflow improvement.

Solution

Development of a population health shared service allowing providers and their health centers to see individual results compared to their peers.