Idaho Health Data Exchange Announces Mental Health and Substance Use Data Initiative

IHDE’s Partnership with Leap Orbit will Provide a Standards-based Consent Management Toolkit to Facilitate Sharing of Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Information, Improving Coordination of Care

January 27, 2021 (Boise, ID) – Today, Idaho Health Data Exchange (IHDE), Idaho’s statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE), announced a new partnership with Leap Orbit to implement its Consentric granular consent management toolkit built on HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification. The partnership will enable IHDE to expand its HIE network and services to behavioral health providers, facilitate sharing of mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) information with patient approval, and improve coordination across the continuum of care.

The partnership reflects the broader trend in healthcare to treat the whole person by integrating behavioral health services with the physical healthcare infrastructure. With increased awareness, investments, and solutions to better address mental health and SUD across the sector, IHDE’s partnership with Leap Orbit signifies a shift toward whole-person healthcare.

Leap Orbit’s Consentric toolkit enables healthcare organizations to rapidly configure and deploy streamlined digital consent workflows, which will be made widely available to IHDE’s users via initial integrations with its clinical portal and master patient index. As a result, clinicians across Idaho will be able to obtain patient consent quickly and easily during any patient encounter. To maintain patient privacy preferences and safeguard sensitive health information, patients will be able to choose from several data sharing profiles that address their medical and behavioral health information.

“Given the sensitive nature of behavioral health data, it is paramount that IHDE addresses barriers to the appropriate sharing of mental health and SUD information,” said Hans Kastensmith, IHDE Executive Director. “IHDE’s partnership with Leap Orbit will allow our users to easily manage a patient’s privacy preferences as they are working in the patient record.”

“As we begin 2021, COVID-19 remains at the top of everyone’s priority list. However, other public health priorities cannot be ignored, including a meaningful increase in drug overdose deaths arising from ongoing economic uncertainty, social isolation, and restricted access to SUD treatment services,” said David Finney, Leap Orbit Co-founder and Partner. “We’re proud to be working with IHDE to support their vital work to address mental health and SUD-related morbidity and mortality.”

IHDE and Leap Orbit’s new partnership will modernize existing paper-based consent processes and ensure compliance with HIPAA, 42 CFR Part 2, and other federal and state privacy laws. The collaboration also positions IHDE to create new provider-mediated and patient-facing consent workflows as necessary to pursue other data exchange scenarios that align with its commitment to improving the medical, behavioral, and social well-being of all Idahoans.

About Idaho Health Data Exchange

Idaho Health Data Exchange (IHDE), a non-profit 501(c)(3) company, is Idaho’s statewide Health Information Exchange, dedicated to meeting the needs of healthcare providers and ensuring that Idaho’s citizens receive the most effective health services possible. To achieve these goals, IHDE is working with a wide-array of stakeholders and actively building a best in breed technology infrastructure to provide access to reliable data and information, combining traditional healthcare data with other data sources to help address the medical, behavioral, and social needs that influence the well-being of Idahoans. In addition to technology enhancements to improve overall performance, an array of tools aimed at improving patient outcomes will be made available to IHDE participants, including: an analytics platform, a telehealth platform, a remote patient monitoring system, and a social determinants of health platform. As a trusted data sharing partner in Idaho, IHDE looks forward to bringing you a new suite of service offerings to improve quality of health outcomes and reduce the cost of care. For more information, visit: https://idahohde.org/

About Leap Orbit

Founded in 2015, Leap Orbit is the trusted innovation partner to many of the market-leading health data networks, including CRISP, Manifest MedEx, and NEHII. Leap Orbit’s philosophy is to run toward healthcare’s biggest challenges, providing technology and solutions to assist with the opioid crisis and patient data privacy. Through its health organization partners, Leap Orbit’s work reaches at least 45 million patients from Alaska to Maryland. The partnership between IHDE and Leap Orbit adds to Leap Orbit’s momentum as the leading innovator in digital consent management solutions for healthcare. Leap Orbit’s consent platform is being used by HIEs in Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and West Virginia. For more information, visit LeapOrbit.com and follow on LinkedIn.