Impact Statements
Art Davidson, MD
Director of Public Health Informatics, Denver Public Health,
Principal Investigator, Colorado's AHRQ-funded State and Regional Demonstration Project, Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO)
"Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO) is working to build Colorado's capacity for state-wide health information exchange. Funded primarily by AHRQ's federal contract for a State-Regional Demonstration, we conceived, designed, and implemented a 'record locator service' health information exchange based on the Connecting for Health Common Framework federated model.
The Common Framework principle of 'transparency' contributed significantly to the process of engaging community leaders and progressing toward the formation of a non-profit to serve all patients in Colorado. Promoting 'local control of the data' and a distributed design helped engage healthcare entities and establish a positive atmosphere of trust, while maintaining a modest technical scope that could be implemented.
The policies and data sharing agreement documents were critical to demonstrating that a viable model could be achieved with appropriate safeguards for privacy and security. The Common Framework provided specific language to promote dialogue about how to address liability and indemnification, and we used the Common Framework's 'Model Contract for Health Information Exchange' as the basis for our own CORHIO data sharing agreement.
The documents discussing 'patient identity (P5)' and 'patient matching (P4)' were incredibly helpful to our process of understanding a Master Patient Index (MPI), both for technical reasons as well as for communications and community marketing. We are implementing an MPI which includes the reference to the 'locations' where clinical data for an identified patient resides. Each 'location' (participating organization) individually responds to requests for information (lab data, radiology, medication, problem list, and EKG) as described by Connecting for Health's Record Locator Service (RLS). Our participating organizations have reviewed materials from the CFH web site, which has significantly accelerated their understanding and engagement in our HIE discussions."
Dr. Arthur Davidson, Director of Public Health Informatics at Denver Public Health, is principal investigator of Colorado's AHRQ-funded State and Regional Demonstration Project. Intimately involved with efforts to develop a regional health information organization in Colorado (CORHIO), he has advocated for local/state health department collaboration on informatics initiatives and Internet-enabled health data access. Since Colorado began this collaborative quest (2004), Dr. Davidson has been at the core, providing technical and clinical leadership for Colorado's initiative to develop a statewide interoperable exchange (CORHIO). Dr. Davidson is also director of the Denver Center for Public Health Preparedness, one of the original Advance Practice Centers funded by CDC between 1999 and 2004.
Nationally, Dr. Davidson has been an invited discussant regarding health information technology, web-based clinical applications that support personal and public health care goals, improved patient care through systems analysis, and health services research. He is a member of the Population Health and Clinical Care Connection workgroup of the American Health Information Community and co-chaired the Minimum Data Set Steering Committee. He serves on the National Association of County and City Health Officials Informatics Workgroup, International Society of Disease Surveillance Advisory Board and the Board of Scientific Counselors - National Center for Public Health Informatics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
His research and applied informatics activities focus around on-line documentation, ambulatory care decision support tools, paperless health information systems and the interface between personal and public health care. He is a family physician, health services researcher and an associate professor in the Departments of Preventive Medicine/Biometrics and Family Medicine, University of Colorado at Denver, Health Sciences Center.
