Harmony in Healthcare: Building Interoperability Across Specialized Mental Health Settings

The fragmentation of healthcare data across multiple service settings presents significant challenges around coalescing that data into a clinically meaningful format. These issues are further exacerbated when certain stakeholders, like mental health providers, are not eligible for meaningful use incentives and therefore significantly lag behind their physical healthcare provider counterparts when it comes to adoption of EHRs and other clinical IT systems. To address these challenges, the New York State Office of Mental Health (NYS OMH) has begun developing a comprehensive interoperability solution to facilitate the seamless transfer and ingestion of specialized healthcare data from across a range of care settings to a centralized OMH repository. This technical solution and best practices will enable mental healthcare providers to share their data more easily for regulatory tracking and to provide OMH insight on programs and their effectiveness.