Patagonia Health is the first EHR vendor to participate in the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connection for upcoming Title X Family Planning Annual Reporting FPAR 2.0.

CARY, N.C. (October 24, 2014) – Patagonia Health, a leading provider of cloud and apps-based healthcare software, has been selected by the Office of Population Affairs to participate as one of its Form Fillers in the upcoming North American Connectathon, a week long interoperability-testing event held by IHE in Cleveland, OH, January 26-30, 2015. One of the Connectathon’s clinical-use cases (also known as an IHE Profile) is a new Family Planning Profile (FPP) which is driven by the Family Planning Annual Report (FPAR) 2.0 initiative of the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Population Affairs (OPA). OPA administers the federal Title X family planning program.

 

Connectathon events, held worldwide, provide a platform for vendors to exchange information systems and test the functionality of their system’s interoperability before they are rolled out to customers. Patagonia Health is the first of these vendor partners to register to test OPA’s FPP at the 2015 North American event.

A key goal of the OPA’s FPAR 2.0 initiative is to improve health IT infrastructure for Title X Family Planning facilities by using structured data capture, rather than free-form text. “To meet the federal meaningful use requirements, we started using EHR software. We are excited about FPAR 2.0 as it is collecting service in structured data fields rather than open text format. Our staff is capturing that information as part of clinical note and with FPAR 2.0 it will be better. Of course, it will take time and learning to transition to FPAR 2.0.” states Ann Absher, Health Director, Wilkes County Health Department.

There are 4,189 sites across the nation who provide family planning services. All Title X grant recipients are required to provide Family Planning Annual Reports (FPAR). OPA described the importance of vendor participation on their blog, “as the vision for an encounter-level FPAR 2.0 takes shape, it is critical to test the FPP with multiple EHR vendors to catch any glitches before it is rolled out to the network”.

The OPA health IT team is focusing its efforts on making the transition to FPAR 2.0 as smooth as possible for family planning grantees and staff. OPA is taking incremental steps towards the 2.0 system build and hopes to onboard grantees in phases by 2018.

Stay up to date on the Connectathon and FPAR 2.0 by following OPA’s blog at: https://opahit.sites.usa.gov/2014/10/07/its-go-time-2-big-announcements-and-an-urgent-ask/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=Blog&utm_campaign=AegisAnncmnt

Ashok Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Patagonia Health, states “We are delighted to partner with the Office of Population Affairs. This OPA initiative is leveraging national healthcare IT infrastructure, triggered by a federal mandate of EHRs, to provide better service to family planning grantees.” Mathur adds, “As a company, we are proactive and by participating in this Connectathon we can help define the right standard adding value to end users.”

Patagonia Health will be working closely with AEGIS.net a premier provider of Information Technology consulting services, who was awarded the contract to build the platform to test the FPP at Connectathon 2015. Mario Hyland, AEGIS founder and Sr. Vice President, stated: “AEGIS is thrilled at Patagonia Health’s demonstrated leadership in seizing this opportunity as the first organization to work with the HHS OPA team to advance OPA’s Family Planning Profile (FPP) at the 2015 IHE Connectathon. We look forward to helping the Patagonia Health team leverage our Developers Integration Lab (DIL) to accelerate their development process and maximize Connectathon testing success.”

The expected outcome of Connectathon 2015 is a clear vision of vendor capabilities and a mature specification to support reporting structured, encounter-level data from Title X service sites, including regional, state and grantee systems. It will offer more accurate data for annual family planning reports, deliver clinically meaningful performance measures back to providers, and relies on the principle of entering data into medical records once for multiple re-use, providing a more complete picture of population health and quality measures balanced by the needs of clinical workflows with EHR systems.

Patagonia Health, being cloud and apps based, can easily adjust software to meet the new upcoming FPAR 2.0 annual reporting requirements. “We learned from the mistakes of older EHR systems which were designed as data entry tools. Thus, we designed the EHR to make it easy to extract data rather than just enter the data” says Mathur.

Patagonia Health will also compete for a slot funded by the AEGIS contract to demonstrate the software at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) Spring Conference in Chicago next April.

About Patagonia Health Inc.
Patagonia Health Inc. is a healthcare software supplier that has built a cloud and apps-based software solution. The solution includes an integrated, federally-certified, Electronic Health Record (EHR), Practice Management (PM) and Billing software. For more information, visit www.patagoniahealth.com or email info@patagoniahealth.com.

Patagonia Health Inc.

1915 Evans Road
Cary, NC 27513
Email: info@patagoniahealth.com
Phone: (919) 238.4780
Fax: (919) 238.7920
Web: www.patagoniahealth.com