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Improving Quality Care for Children with Special Needs

Project Final Report (PDF, 187.42 KB) Disclaimer

Project Details -
Completed

The purpose of this project was to develop the health information technology (health IT) infrastructure in Tennessee to promote and improve the safety and quality of health care for children with special health care needs (CSHCN). The project expanded an electronic health record linking data from newborn screening and newborn hearing screening and birth certificates to include other CSHCN. The planning project focused on integration/linkage of data for the Tennessee Child Health Profile (TN-CHP), with implementation of web browser data access to case managers and primary care physicians (with parental permission). The project partners are the Genetic Centers at UT Knoxville, UT Memphis and Vanderbilt, the Child Development Center at Vanderbilt, the UT Boling Center for Developmental Disabilities in Memphis and an acute care hospital (University Health Systems /UT Medical Center). The users include rural and urban providers. TN-CHP will include data on each child linked via a secure data warehouse located at UHS on the same Local Area Network (LAN) as the web server, and both will be behind Cisco firewalls. Once consent has been given by the parent /guardian the child's health data will be imported from the partner's sites into TN-CHP by Virtual Private Network (VPN). Major project successes include: 1) Participation of major stakeholders, 2) arrangements for data sharing between the partner organizations, 3) IRB approval from UT and TDH 4) involvement of Physicians, 5) collaboration with the Vanderbilt Volunteer e-Health Initiative, a major AHRQ-funded RHIO project.