Health Center Controlled Network - Community HealthCare Association of the Dakotas (CHAD) submits this application as the State Primary Care Association for North Dakota and South Dakota, in partnership with the Wyoming Primary Care Association, for a grant with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) pursuant to CFDA No. 93.129. Community-based health care service delivery continues to be a challenge in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming due to its widely dispersed and increasingly diverse populations. These three states have a combined land mass of nearly 246,000 miles with only a little over 2.2 million residents. The primarily urban health centers in the Dakotas and Wyoming serve a higher percentage of people who are uninsured, living in poverty, are immigrants and refugees, and people experiencing homelessness. Rural and frontier centers often serve a more elderly patient population, there can be significant overlap with rural Native American populations, and a large proportion of veterans are served. The Great Plains Health Data Network (GPHDN) is a collaboration that harnesses the strength of the Health Center Controlled Networks (HCCN) program to support the technical capacity of some of the most remote and under-resourced health centers in the country. The GPHDN brings together 11 health centers, which are Section 330 funded, serving 68 sites. They collectively serve 105,775 total patients across South Dakota, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The GPHDN represents nearly all the health centers operating in the three states, with a mission of supporting its members through collaboration, shared resources, expertise, and data to improve clinical, financial, and operational performance. Within the GPHDN there are five electronic health records (EHRs). Often, these EHRs have limited ability to provide actionable reports and workflows to capture the data in a structured manner, which can be cumbersome and inefficient. Additionally, health center staff often have competing priorities or simply do not have the systems in place to consistently validate data and pursue performance improvement using that data. The GPHDN will support participating health centers (PHCs) by leveraging health information technology (HIT) and data to enhance delivery of affordable, accessible, and high-quality primary health care with a specific focus on data management and analytics, interoperability of systems and digital health tools, and UDS+ implementation. Year one of the project period will use resources provided by the HCCN funding to continue optimizing the network-wide population health data management tool and provide technical assistance to PHCs to use data to improve operational efficiencies and clinical outcomes within their organizations. Year one of the project will also provide technical assistance to PHCs to increase the number of health center patients served. Years two and three will be focused on building relationships with partners and payers to use data to sustain the GPHDN and increase PHC revenue by increasing participation in value-based care. The goal of this project is to increase HIT utilization to allow PHCs and the GPHDN to become data driven organizations that utilize data to provide secure, high quality, patient-centered care in a care team environment and to successfully navigate the future of healthcare.
