Tuesday, April 8, 2025
4/8/2025
Behavioral Health eCarePlan Collaborative Project - This application proposes to adapt an open source SMART on FHIR application based on the HL7 MCC eCarePlan effort for 3 behavioral health use cases and pilot the application in stand-alone behavioral health clinics with challenges in exchanging health information. This is in response to the Accelerate Adoption of Health Information Technology in Behavioral Health ONC LEAP grant. The eCarePlan effort is a public-private partnership with multiple federal agencies, health systems, professional societies, and other partners that intends to define key information standards to enable comprehensive, person-centered care planning; the implementation guide for the effort is under ballot at HL7. The MyCarePlanner and eCarePlanner SMART on FHIR® applications were developed based on these standards, and are intended to be broad but configurable tools to gather relevant information - including from patients - most useful in care planning. This includes data originally generated in multiple different settings, including behavioral and physical health sites. The application has built-in ability to facilitate patient-directed information flow, including to collect patient-reported outcomes and write them via FHIR® to appropriate sites. These FHIR® applications are intended to be adapted for different uses; previous work has focused on pharmacy, diabetes, hypertension, and care transitions adaptations. For this effort, we propose to work directly with Behavioral Health (BH) clinics that are not attached to physical health sites and have limited ability to connect via health information exchange. We will enhance the application based on BH team and patient input, keeping its light weight FHIR® format. We will then implement the application and explore three use-cases with them 1) Longitudinal care planning for patients with complex physical and behavioral needs; 2) Monitoring mood disorders with structured patient reported outcome measurements; and 3) Adapting care plans at unplanned transitions of care (e.g., on hospital discharge). For people with behavioral health needs, these are particularly challenging times - the combination of physical, behavioral, and social care needs require many adaptations to care plans from many different team members. For each use case, we will create well-defined evaluations specific to the information needs and goals, and state success criteria for the use of the application. The results will be shared not only with the BH sites and their patients but we will consistently engage with a number of key groups focused on open-source tools, including HL7, BH Peer Support networks, and the eCarePlan cross-agency management group. Aim 1. Fine tune the MyCarePlanner/eCarePlanner applications to improve the exchange of structured behavioral health data, enabling both standard storage to a supplemental data store and write-back to any EHR available. The system is built to allow any structured data collection form to be incorporated and translated into FHIR® questionnaire queries. Aim 2. Connect and pilot the MyCarePlanner/eCarePlanner applications to a set of Behavioral Health providers with EHRs with limited Health Information Exchange capabilities. Aim 3. Perform a formal evaluation of the applications' capabilities for 3 key behavioral health use cases.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).