Massachusetts’ Healthcare Organizations Advance Information Sharing with First Request for Proposal

The Data Governance Collaborative, a group of healthcare payers and providers convened by the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium (MHDC), has released its first Request for Proposal for a community-wide, cloud-hosted health data service. This service will provide payers and providers with a shared, hosted utility to map the codes required for successful health data interoperability.

The recently enacted Final Rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology mandate industry-wide interoperability and prohibit the information-blocking practices that have prevented consumers from making well-informed medical decisions. With this service, health plans and health providers will be able to translate, in real time, their existing codes for diagnoses, procedures, vital signs, lab results, drugs, and other clinical information into those codes required for the automation of patient-centric data exchange.

“Our focus, as a consortium, is to prepare healthcare stakeholders for what an information-sharing economy will require of them,” said Denny Brennan, MHDC’s Executive Director. “Without shared and standardized vocabularies for health data, interoperability is impossible.”

The organizations currently participating in the Data Governance Collaborative are:

• Berkshire Health Systems
• Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
• Fallon Health
• Harvard Pilgrim Health Care
• New England Quality Care Alliance
• Steward Health Care                      
• Tufts Health Plan

Contact Information

Arleen Coletti

Director of Member Services

Massachusetts Health Data Consortium

acoletti@mahealthdata.org