NC HIEA Update June 2024

NC HIEA Hosts Work Group to Share How NC HealthConnex Benefits Behavioral Health Providers, New Email Communication Protocols

Author: Jessica Hagins

NC HIEA Hosts Work Group to Share How NC HealthConnex Benefits Behavioral Health Providers

Recently, the N.C. Health Information Exchange Authority held its annual meeting for the Behavioral Health Work Group. This work group provides an educational forum for behavioral health and intellectual and developmental disability providers, industry trade organizations, state agency partners and vendors to work together in a collaborative environment.

During this work group, NC HIEA staff gave an overview of updates relevant to BH/IDD providers, including:

We also covered information about NC*Notify, the event notification service of NC HealthConnex. NC*Notify provides near real-time admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) alerts when patients you choose to monitor receive care at another facility or have another qualifying event. As a reminder, you do not need to wait until your connection is live to request training or to begin using services such NC*Notify.

Guest presenter Eumeka Dudley from NC Medicaid gave an overview of Tailored Plans and Tailored Care Management. Some reminders and resources from the NC Medicaid team are included below.

Helpful Resources for Providers Ahead of Tailored Plans Launch

Tailored Plans will launch on July 1, 2024. The Local Management Entities (LMEs) that will run Tailored Plans – Alliance Health, Partners Health Management, Trillium Health Resources and Vaya Health – are all ready to go live.

Tailored Plans include services for people with serious mental health issues, substance use issues, intellectual and developmental disabilities and traumatic brain injury. People with NC Medicaid Direct who receive services for these needs may be moved to a Tailored Plan. The name will change, but the services will not.

The following are some helpful resources from the N.C. Division of Health Benefits regarding Tailored Plans and Tailored Care Management:

The Behavioral Health Work Group is working to inform a connection strategy to onboard behavioral health providers to NC HealthConnex, as well as develop use cases for the integration of physical and behavioral health. If you are interested in learning more about this work group, please email hiea@nc.gov.

 

New Email Communication Protocols for the NC HIEA

From time to time, we send our participants communications about updates from the NC HIEA, training opportunities, and account-related information.

These updates may be sent to the Point of Contact or Participant Account Administrator (PAA) listed in your Participation Agreement or to registered users of the NC HealthConnex Clinical Portal. We use mailing software to distribute these updates from the email address “hiea@nc.gov."

We are transitioning to a new workflow within our mailing software platform, which means we must recreate our distribution lists. The new workflow allows us to create three specific lists to ensure that you never miss important notifications.

If you had previously unsubscribed from NC HIEA communications, we apologize if you receive emails from these new lists. You may unsubscribe from the first two lists if you do not wish to receive these communications:

  • NC HIEA Monthly Update: Our monthly newsletter
  • Webinar Invitations: Invitations to trainings and webinars such as Teletown Hall and Office Hours
  • Account-Related Emails: Emails relevant to your Clinical Portal Account or status as an NC HIEA Participant. This could include reminders to complete the Quarterly User Audit.

Please do not unsubscribe from emails you see related to your account. If we see an unsubscribe from emails of this type, we will reach out to your organization to ensure that we still have the correct Point of Contact or PAA or that you still wish to participate with the NC HIEA.

There's a chance that our emails may occasionally end up in your spam or junk folder. To prevent this and ensure you receive every update from us, please consider doing the following:

  • Add “hiea@nc.gov” as a contact in your system.
  • Look for an option in your email settings to add us to your Safe Senders list. This ensures that our emails are recognized as legitimate and not marked as spam.
  • Create a filter that automatically moves emails from a specific address directly to your inbox.

Keep in mind that “hiea@nc.gov” is the same email address we use to respond to you if you reach out directly with questions or concerns. If you do not add us to Safe Senders, you may miss direct communications with NC HIEA staff.

Thank you for helping us ensure that we can reach you with important information and updates.

 

Employee Spotlight

Sasikala Nagarajan

Data Quality Lead

Sasikala Nagarajan, known to the NC HIEA team as Sasi, joined the Data Quality and Integrity team in August 2022 and has been recently promoted to Data Quality Lead. Sasi frequently works with NC HealthConnex participants and our technical partner SAS to complete inbound data ingestion and integration tasks.

Sasi has more than 20 years of experience in a wide range of Information Technology topics, including requirements design, development, quality assurance and data analytics. She has worked primarily in the health care industry with a focus on working on Medicaid and Medicare patient data.

 

Connex Kudos:

“The emergency ADT feed from NC*Notify I reviewed yesterday was timely, and when I went into HealthConnex to pull the CCD, I was able to get some valuable information regarding the physical condition of the client, which could then be shared with the direct care staff in the program as the guardian failed to let us know when she dropped the child off for treatment.”

- Behavioral Health Agency