Project Purpose and Goals
The Connecting Communities Colorado eHealth Initiative (CCCeHI) is an innovative clinical informatics project that will demonstrate the feasibility of providing electronic continuity for clinical services, in order to improve the quality of patient care and make the delivery of care more efficient and therefore, less costly.

With support from the Foundation for eHealth Initiative, the CCeHI project will: establish a secure environment and the necessary legal framework for sharing clinical data, develop a master patient index, build an interface engine for clinical data acquisition from four data repositories, create a secure web server application to display integrated clinical information, and pilot-test the application in participating institutions. In the second phase, the CCCeHI project will fully integrate the initiative among the participating institutions, carry out an evaluation, and execute the business plan that will cover operating expenses. In the third phase, CCeHI will expand statewide.

Project Participants
The CCCeHI consortium aims to create the technical capacity, legal framework and secure environment to enable clinicians to access patient information from the clinical data repositories of four health care delivery systems: the Denver Health integrated hospital and community clinic system, The Children’s Hospital, the University of Colorado Hospital, and the Kaiser Permanente of Colorado Health Plan.

These four institutions are affiliated with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC) and each serves as a primary teaching/training venue for medical students, residents, fellows, and other health professionals.

UCHSC is the only academic medical center within a 500-mile radius, and the School of Medicine is the only medical school in the state. The Children’s Hospital is the largest provider of pediatric specialty care in the state. The University of Colorado Hospital is the largest teaching hospital in the Metro area, and Denver Health annually provides services to more than 150,000 Denver residents. These three institutions are the major providers of underserved/underinsured care in the state. Kaiser Permanente of Colorado has more than 400,000 enrollees and is the third-largest HMO in the State.

Contribution to the Field
Despite substantial investment in clinical information systems by consortium members, these systems do not communicate with each other, resulting in fragmented patient care as patients visit multiple institutions for more intensive care or consultation.  The project participants believe that patient problem lists, laboratory and radiology studies, care plans (including current medications and allergies), concerns about likely complications and advance directives should be easily accessible regardless of where a patient seeks care.

The CCCeHI project offers the potential to advance the continuity, quality, safety, and efficiency of clinical care. Phase I of the project will focus in particular on the establishment of a legal framework and a secure technical environment for accurately linking patient data in a way that protects patient privacy—a key challenge for all communities interested in health information exchange. As a result, lessons learned from the project will be valuable to all stakeholders in the field that are mobilizing information to support health and healthcare.