In late 2019, the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) will launch the California Health Information Exchange Onboarding Program (Cal-HOP), making roughly $50 million in state and federal funds available to Medi-Cal providers to increase their use of health information exchange technology. Specifically, Cal-HOP will focus on growing provider participation in California’s nonprofit regional health information organizations (HIOs). By better equipping providers to exchange timely and accurate information about the patients they share, Cal-HOP aims to ultimately improve the quality and effectiveness of the care that Medi-Cal beneficiaries receive.

The California Health Care Foundation and Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF) are supporting DHCS in the planning and implementation of Cal-HOP. BSCF recently engaged Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, to develop an approach to measuring HIO progress, having identified the health and activity of HIOs as a key indicator of California’s efforts to increase data exchange more broadly.

The paper describing the results of this work — Health Information Exchange Metrics and Evaluation Strategy for California — outlines Adler-Milstein’s recommendations, which were informed by interviews with executives of California’s HIOs and DHCS leadership.