Impact Statements

"The Connecting for Health Common Framework has been an invaluable resource for examining the policies and technical issues involved in building a federated model for health information exchange in Arizona.

In January 2007, the AHCCCCS, Arizona's Medicaid program, began a project to develop and implement a web-based HIE utility to achieve the goal of giving all Medicaid providers instant access to a beneficiaries' health records. The Common Framework documents that addressed the technical architecture, policies for a federated health information exchange, and the necessary data sharing agreements were vital to development and implementation of the Electronic Health Record (HIeHR) Utility Project. The Common Framework allowed us to significantly jumpstart our process by examining and clarifying the essential concepts involved in building a federated exchange system, such as where data should reside, what is an RLS and what data should it manage, and who is responsible for data accuracy and patient consent. The Common Framework helped us define how our HIE would operate.

Having the Common Framework model contract available to the public greatly accelerated development of our data sharing agreements for both data providers as well as users. The Arizona Health Privacy Project, funded by an AHRQ grant, used the Common Framework model contract to develop a data sharing agreement which is now being used by AHCCCS to establish our HIE."