e-Health Initiatives

Based on the KEHN Board's initial assessment, the Board has undertaken several critical breakthrough projects and long-term planning necessary for the development of e-Health in Kentucky, including the following:

• Kentucky Health Information Partnership (K-HIP) is a project facilitated by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to bring together major health care organizations in Kentucky to develop a common web portal for provider-payor communications. The portal will contain a clinical site for accessing a patient health summary based on claims data and an administrative site for handling common administrative transactions electronically. Through this portal, health care providers would have secure access to clinical information on more than 60 percent of the patients they see and administrative tasks would be simplified and standardized.
  
• The e-Prescribing Partnerships in Kentucky (ePPIK) Grant Program is a new grant program that will assist with adoption of health information technology to advance the e-Prescribing in the Commonwealth. Offered by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services in partnership with the Kentucky e-Health Network Board and the Governor's Office for Local Development, the ePPIK Grant program will promote the formation of partnerships within a community between physician's offices, hospitals, pharmacies and other health care entities to facilitate true end-to-end electronic prescription processing. A total of $300,000 in funding for the ePPiK grant program comes from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky and the Hal Roger's Grant Program that supports the Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting (eKASPER), the nation's premier program of to monitor prescription drug abuse of controlled substances.
  
• The Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration is a federally-funded collaboration to assess how privacy and security practices and policies affect health information exchange (HIE). Kentucky is one of 33 states participating in the project. There are multiple working groups established for the project that are identifying and addressing business practice and legal barriers to HIE. The Cabinet for Health and Family Services serves as the project manager and is partnering with the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky on this project.
  
• The Kentucky e-Health Network Board plans to host a statewide e-Health Summit in January 2007 as a means to bring together payors, providers, policy makers, consumers and other interested stakeholders to learn about and discuss the development of e-Health in Kentucky .
  
• The e-Health Advisory Group, a group of technical and clinical experts in e-Health, have been appointed and are charged with advising the Kentucky e-Health Network Board regarding the development of a statewide e-Health network and developing an action plan for implementing e-health in Kentucky.