Connecting to the Health Analytics Reporting Platform

Overview

Some organizations participating in the statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) may be eligible to obtain access to the HIE’s Health Analytics Reporting Platform (HARP). HARP contains a suite of use case-driven analytics tailored over the years in collaboration with our HIE participants to yield actionable insights into the quality, safety, and delivery of patient care and population health.

In an effort to ensure that participants have the necessary resources in place to support their connection to HARP, the following sections provide an overview of the expectations and activities involved in the onboarding process.

To learn more about the features and functionality available in the Health Analytics Reporting Platform, visit the online user guide.

Project Expectations

Once participants' available data interface(s) have been connected, validated, and deployed, they may choose to reconvene with HealthInfoNet’s Onboarding Project Team to review and confirm the processes, resources, and dependencies involved in connecting to HARP. Common topics explored during project kickoff meetings include:

• Establishing roles and responsibilities among HealthInfoNet’s Onboarding Project Team and participants' business and technical leads and/or their vendors and partners.

  • HealthInfoNet requires participants to assign an internal Project Manager to convene required stakeholders, troubleshoot technical activities, and facilitate successful deliverables throughout the course of the onboarding project.

  • Additionally, HealthInfoNet recommends that participants identify staff members specifically to support required training/education activities and technical support needs.

• Coordinating ongoing project check-in calls to monitor technical integration, validation outcomes, action items, and/or blockers.

• Providing a high-level demonstration of HARP’s available features and functionality.

• Evaluating participants' current data interface(s) connections, data quality expectations, and relevant impacts to service features and functionality.

• Confirming that participants are able to access HARP via the HIE’s Clinical Portal using the required secure connection configuration.

• Explaining the use of HealthInfoNet’s organization roster in user management and patient attribution processes.

• Discussing HARP’s role-based permissions and available end-user user account roles, and their respective responsibilities and obligations.

• Reviewing HealthInfoNet’s privacy, security, and compliance requirements, including relevant HIE references in State of Maine statutes.

Depending on participants' contractual circumstances and/or technical capabilities, topics included in the project kickoff meeting may vary and will be tailored accordingly with all involved stakeholders.

Implementation Activities

Following the project kickoff meeting, HealthInfoNet will collaborate with participants and their vendors and partners to establish secure connectivity and other relevant access points to enable participants' access to HARP. Additionally, HARP-specific configurations will be reviewed and implemented accordingly. Common areas explored during implementation include:

• Data Interface(s) Connections

• Secure Connections

• IP Whitelisting

• Organization Roster Validation

• Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution Development

• Secure File Transfer Methods

• User Account Creation

• User Acceptance Testing

Data Interface(s) Connections

At a minimum, participants' Health Level Seven (HL7) Admission, Discharge, Transfer (ADT) data interfaces must be connected to HealthInfoNet and include all patient demographics, encounter/visit history information, and diagnosis coding as discrete data elements to support core analytic and reporting functions. At this time, clinical data sets formatted in the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (CCDA) standard are not compatible with HARP.

Should participants need to establish a discrete HL7 ADT data interface with HealthInfoNet to support core functions, or establish additional discrete HL7 data interface(s) to support optional functions (e.g., electronic clinical quality measurement (eCQM) or other more sophisticated measurement), they must:

• Work with HealthInfoNet to identify the necessary discrete data elements, and therefore the required HL7 data interface(s), to support core (and optional, if desired) functions.

• Confirm that they have a Participant Agreement with HealthInfoNet that supports the breadth of the requested HL7 data interface(s) connections.

• Review the processes, resources, and dependencies involved in connecting HL7 data interfaces with the statewide HIE by visiting the section on Connecting Data Interfaces.

In order to initiate new data interface(s) connections with HealthInfoNet, participants must contact HealthInfoNet’s Client Engagement team (clientengagement@hinfonet.org) to determine the appropriate contracting and/or business/technical next steps before further HARP onboarding tasks can be pursued.

Secure Connections

Participants access HARP through the HIE’s Clinical Portal electronic health record system as a way of reducing administrative burden and log-in fatigue. However, whereas participants can choose to securely connect to the Clinical Portal via a site-to-site virtual private network (VPN) tunnel or two-factor authentication (2FA) HTTPS connection to access patients' health records, access to HARP’s reporting dashboards specifically requires participants to enter the Clinical Portal via a VPN connection. This is the case in order to add an additional layer of encryption when viewing Protected Health Information (PHI) in bulk.

For those participants actively accessing the Clinical Portal via 2FA, they must work with HealthInfoNet to establish secure connection to the Clinical Portal via a site-to-site VPN tunnel between their healthcare location(s) and HealthInfoNet’s secure data center in order to obtain access to HARP. In order to establish a VPN connection with HealthInfoNet, participants must:

• Complete HealthInfoNet’s VPN Secure Connection Guide to initiate technical implementation of the VPN tunnel.

• Make available IT resources (i.e., internal staff or technical vendors/partners) familiar with VPN connections, subnets, and network address translation (NAT) processes.

• Implement a firewall solution capable of supporting a VPN connection and a NAT process.

IP Whitelisting

In addition to enforcing access to the HARP user interface via the Clinical Portal’s secure VPN connection option, HealthInfoNet’s IT team must also whitelist participants' Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to specifically allow their authorized end users to access the server where the HARP data warehouse resides. In order to ensure seamless connectivity, participants must have all IP addresses available from where authorized end users will be accessing HARP to ensure they are appropriately configured as trusted entities.

Organization Roster Validation

HARP leverages HealthInfoNet’s organization roster to inform several important functions, including role-based permissions, patient attribution, and rendering facility identification on encounter records. To ensure that HARP is as accurate as possible when delivering critical insights into patient care and population health, HealthInfoNet requires participants to validate their portion of the organization roster. To do so, participants must:

• Confirm that each of their active participating healthcare location(s) are identified in the roster. In the event of discrepancies:

  • Add any location(s) that are missing from the roster.

  • Remove any location(s) that are included erroneously in the roster.

• For each of the their active participating healthcare location(s), validate the following information stored in the roster:

  • Business name/description

  • Organizational type(s) (e.g., hospital, ambulatory, behavioral health, etc.)

  • National Provider Identifier (NPI) value(s)

  • Address information

  • Participation in the Office of MaineCare Service’s value-based care programs (e.g., Accountable Community (AC) initiative, Primary Care Plus program, etc.)

  • Membership in an Accountable Care Organization (ACO)

  • Relationship(s) with other healthcare location(s) (i.e., their child/parent relationships)

  • Identification in connected ADT data interfaces

For more information about the HARP processes that involve HealthInfoNet’s organization roster, visit the following methodology sections of the online user guide:

• User Permissions

• Patient Attribution

Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution Development

HARP currently maintains three types of attribution methodologies that assign individual patients to providers and/or organizations for reporting purposes. For more information about these attribution types, view the HARP user guide’s methodology section on Patient Attribution.

For participants that are unable to use HARP’s encounter-based or MaineCare AC patient attribution methodologies, they are required to complete their own custom attribution files (“Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution”) in order to inform the type and amount of information that they are able to view within the reporting dashboards. These files make use of HealthInfoNet’s organization roster to inform patient-to-provider and/or patient-to-organization attribution for their reportable patient populations.

Because the creation of Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution is not a requirement of all participants connecting to HARP, but a service that all participants can choose to leverage, the conversation during onboarding processes is often different and therefore tailored to each participant’s circumstances and needs. Furthermore, because the creation of Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution is an ongoing process for participants that do choose to leverage it, information about its methodology and development can be found within the HARP online user guide’s section on Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution.

Secure File Transfer Methods

For participants that choose to leverage Participant-Supplied Custom Attribution, they must share their attribution files with HealthInfoNet in a secure manner due to the PHI contained in the file.

During initial onboarding processes, HealthInfoNet requires participants to share their custom attribution files via secure email messages, which HealthInfoNet will initiate to ensure that the messages are encrypted according to HealthInfoNet’s policy.

Following participants' go-live acceptance in the Production environment, they may choose to transition to sharing their attribution files on an ongoing basis via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) connectivity. In order to establish a SFTP connection with HealthInfoNet, participants must:

• Identify two individuals at their organization who will be responsible for uploading their attribution files to the dedicated folder on HealthInfoNet’s SFTP server.

• Provide the static IP address from which their organization’s attribution files will be delivered.

• Download a SFTP client of their organization’s choosing to enable the delivery of their attribution files.

Should participants choose not to transition to sharing their attribution files via SFTP following initial onboarding processes, they can continue to support ongoing file exchange via HealthInfoNet’s secure email protocol.

User Account Creation

Once participants are securely connected to HARP and have established and validated key inputs to operationalize the service, they can then choose to credential their authorized end users to begin using the reporting dashboards. To start this process, participants must designate an “Account Authorizer,” an individual(s) at their organization who can approve the creation of new accounts for authorized staff.

During and following onboarding, Account Authorizers are responsible for completing HealthInfoNet’s HARP New User Request Form and returning the form to HealthInfoNet’s Customer Care team (customercare@hinfonet.org) for account creation.

Note: Unlike the Clinical Portal, there is no Help Desk user account available for Account Authorizers to manage their organization’s authorized HARP end users' accounts ongoing.

To learn more about the steps involved in ensuring that new users are given the appropriate role-based permissions in the system, visit the HARP online user guide’s section on User Permissions.

User Acceptance Testing

During participants' data interface(s) connection onboarding projects, a key validation requirement is to confirm that the information displayed in the HIE’s services align with the information stored in their electronic health record (EHR) systems. For that reason, HARP onboarding projects include a user acceptance testing (UAT) process that is designed not for participants to re-validate data sets but instead to confirm that:

• There are no obvious data nuances or gaps identified in the reporting dashboards.

• All authorized end users have the appropriate role-based permissions.

• All available attribution methodologies display the relevant and expected patient panels.

• All available components within each reporting dashboard (i.e., the filters, linkages, metrics, charts, tables) meet their authorized end users' use cases and workflow needs.

To complete the HARP UAT process, HealthInfoNet’s Onboarding Project Team will provide participants with a document outlining several functional areas within the reporting dashboards to understand, review, validate, and confirm. Once completed and returned by participants to HealthInfoNet, all findings will be fully investigated and either remediated or understood before participants can provide formal acceptance to go-live with the HARP instance within the Production environment.

Go-Live Acceptance

Once all required implementation activities have been completed, the onboarding project will be ready to be formally closed. At that time, HealthInfoNet’s Onboarding Project Manager will provide participants with a go-live acceptance form containing a high-level overview of accomplished tasks and a signature line where participants' authorized team members must attest that all activities have been fulfilled to their satisfaction and/or in accordance with the terms of the HIE’s Participant Agreement. Additionally, warm handoffs to HealthInfoNet’s Client Engagement (clientengagement@hinfonet.org) and Clinical Education (clinicaleducation@hinfonet.org) teams will be made to support participants' ongoing needs.