Quovadx, Inc.
With Cloverleaf® Integration Services from Quovadx, Inc., the Florida Department of Health now provides managers and policy makers with access to critical data residing in various counties across the state.
Situation
The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) is responsible for protecting the health and safety of all people in Florida through public health services. Serving 67 counties, 22 Children's Medical Services Offices and five state laboratories, the FDOH must track critical services (sewage and sanitation systems), maintain systems to track disease statistics and mobilize disaster response to teams in emergencies to deliver quality public health services.
Traditionally, FDOH program areas collected their own data and organized it into separate applications with their own data codes, definitions and formats. Duplicate data entry into disparate systems produced unreliable information that was often out of sync and inefficient for the purposes of policy development and timely intervention. Additionally, aggregated data was needed at state and federal levels for immunization history and CDC smallpox reporting.
Solution
With Cloverleaf® Integration Services from Quovadx, Inc., the FDOH now provides managers and policy makers with access to critical data residing in various counties across the state. The Cloverleaf engine is used to map legacy electronic billing formats for Medicaid to HIPAA compliant formats for three of the largest patient care systems in the state without the need to make programming changes to the existing systems that bill Medicaid.
The Cloverleaf solution also guarantees the delivery of messages, enables rapid development and deployment of application interfaces between systems and provides a means of maintaining compliance with any new HIPAA format changes. While making the data available to a larger audience, the privacy and security of sensitive health data is also maintained by the solution's ability to manage security and business rules for each system.
Better Health & Lower Costs
On an individual level, the FDOH's ability to access critical data has led to early detection and intervention of impending healthcare risks to patients across the state. The FDOH is now able to immediately distribute email alerts as soon as lab reports are processed by the Cloverleaf engine. In at least one documented instance, labs detected positive test results for STD in a newborn baby and it was critically important to start treatment as soon as possible, before being released from the hospital. Through the Cloverleaf solution, an email alert was sent to the county health department caseworkers to inform them of the situation, enabling them to enact an immediate care protocol which saved the baby’s life.
At the State level, implementation of the Cloverleaf solution has resulted in vastly improved data accessibility. Laboratory data needed for disease surveillance programs can now be accessed within 48 hours vs. a previous average of 10 days. Historically, lab results were faxed to either the county health department or the program area and were often incomplete or difficult to read. Now the full report is delivered electronically, ensuring that all pertinent details reach the caseworker. For sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), more rapid intervention produced over $850,000 in first year savings.
On a Federal level, the department can now make connections between diseases and infected persons or populations in multiple locations. The FDOH is now positioned to respond to national biohazard security threats, such as smallpox or anthrax, and can quickly identify and respond to regional outbreaks and environmental hazards. Through expanded capabilities from their Cloverleaf solution, the FDOH was able to electronically transform and securely transmit data from their Immunization Registry to the CDC system. As a result, Florida was the first state to meet the CDC’s reporting requirements, enabling the CDC to have an immediate view of the smallpox vaccination progress via a Web application.
