Cal INDEX Progress Report
As you know from my prior posts, Cal INDEX is committed to improving the healthcare system in California. Since the announcement of the formation of Cal INDEX last August, we have made tremendous strides in achieving our goal of establishing the underlying data and technology platform to achieve our information-sharing mission. By providing doctors, nurses and hospitals throughout California with a unified source of integrated patient information, we will help them provide better care while avoiding complications, lowering costs and reducing inefficiencies. Giving doctors and nurses a more complete picture of your health status will allow them to make better decisions about care and ultimately save lives.
During the past decade, health plans and providers have invested heavily in systems that have allowed them to successfully migrate from paper charts to electronic records. This explosion of computable information enables new ways to manage, coordinate and improve care but a significant challenge remains to be solved which is how to share this data, a capability called interoperability. Our goal is to manage this fragmented data in a way that makes it faster and easier for health plans and providers to leverage this vital information to meet the twin goals of improved care and lower costs.
For consumers, having your health data included in a health information exchange like Cal INDEX has important benefits. For example, if you are away from home in another part of the state and become unconscious following an accident, the staff at the emergency room where you are transported can electronically access accurate, up-to-date medical records for you. They can look up such important information as your medical conditions and drugs allergies, both critically important. By having access to your medical history, they can provide you with the most effective care – personalized to your specific medical situation.
Protecting patient privacy and ensuring the security of personal health information is our highest priority. It’s critical to our ability to operate as a health information exchange and to secure agreements with the hospitals, physician groups and health plans that will supply and use the data. We follow all applicable federal and state privacy laws; maintain strong security systems around the exchange itself; and, are fortunate to have a tremendously experienced chief privacy officer on our executive team and a seasoned consumer advocate on our Board of Directors to guide our efforts.
In addition to the technical work of building out the infrastructure, our team has been working to establish policies and procedures to meet our obligations as custodian of this data. We have privacy policies to guide our internal operations and have released our Notice of Privacy Practices, which is designed to share essential elements of these principles and policies with the public and covers important information about:
- How we obtain the data
- Which data are included and excluded
- How we use or share the data
- Our responsibilities
- Consumer rights
I encourage you to read our Notice of Privacy Practices by clicking here.
In closing, I wish each of you a healthy and happy holiday season and a Happy New Year!
David Watson, CEO, Cal INDEX