Tampa Bay Partnership

Tampa Bay
Regional Health Information Organization

When you have a doctor’s appointment, shouldn’t your doctor have the most complete and up-to date information about your health history, the lab test recently completed and the prescriptions you are taking?

Would you like to be able to get the latest information about types of medications, treatments, and methods of making your life healthier?

There is an organization, sponsored by the Tampa Bay Partnership that believes the answer to both of these questions is YES!

The Tampa Bay Regional Health Information Organization (TBRHIO) is a community based, public/private partnership committed to the development of a regional health information network.

The TBRHIO’s vision is to use the internet to make health records available to doctors and patients at the time and place such information is needed.

The State of Florida is also committed to making this idea come true. The State provided grant funding to the TBRHIO to set up a demonstration of how hospitals, pharmacies and doctor’s offices can share information with each other.

This project is focusing on communicating sample data related to three chronic problems - pediatric asthma, adult diabetes and prostate cancer – for a selected group of patients and their physicians. The work of the project is being conducted by area hospitals and physicians, the University of South Florida, two software development firms and several business leaders interested in supporting this effort:

to understand patients’ needs for information related to their care

to provide selected physicians with on-line access to selected patient data from hospitals and pharmacies

to provide physicians with access to protocols of care and expert references

to provide a means for selected patients to use the internet to view their own selected health record information

to gain experience in applying technology to meet the stated objectives in a way that insures the accuracy of the data and secures the data from unauthorized access

to identify next steps in the development or acquisition of computer applications and processes required for a sustainable electronic health information network

The Tampa Bay RHIO

The Tampa Bay Partnership is a seven-county not-for-profit organization committed to economic development, research and education. The Partnership supported community leaders to craft the vision for the Tampa Bay Regional Health Information Organization (TBRHIO). The express purpose of the TBRHIO is design and implementation of an electronic health information exchange that serves to improve the health status of and reduce costs associated with the target patient populations. The TBRHIO strategy development and implementation involve chief information officers, medical directors, senior administrators, and researchers. Russ Thomas, CEO of Gold Standard, Inc is chairman of the TBRHIO and the executive team includes legal, clinical, technical, financial and project management expertise. The team provides hands on guidance to project activities across legal, clinical outcome, informatics and financial work teams.

The initial data exchange demonstration underway supports disease management for three target populations: adult diabetics, pediatric asthma, and prostate cancer patients and includes hospitals, pharmacies and physician practices. The data exchange provides core patient discharge information from Tampa General, All Children’s and the Moffitt Cancer Institute combined with information from area pharmacies and displays that information to the physician and patient at website and via hand-held devices. Also accessible to the patient are a personal health information profile and individualized education materials.

The next phase project will expand participation of area providers and serve as a pilot implementation of the TBRHIO program. It will further demonstrate the capacity to share a functional health information package among competing providers while affording consumers access to increased health education information and data about their own health records. It will also define the financial sustainability strategy appropriate for the implementation of the fully operational TBRHIO, including realizable cost savings opportunities.

The funding for the current project involves at least 50/50 matching funds from the Partnership and its members. The budget includes $467,000 in state grant funding from the FHIN (Florida Health Information Network) program at the Agency for Health Administration (AHCA) and at least $560,000 in cash, products and services provided in-kind by Partnership Critical milestones to date for the current demonstration project have been met and the technology demonstration will be successfully completed by June 30, 2006.

The budget for the next phase includes application for both state and federal funding for a significant share of the estimated costs for the project. Again, the Tampa Bay Partnership will assist in obtaining cash and cost-share contributions from members committed to improving healthcare quality and accessibility for the area.