OCHIN's Background

Who We Are

OCHIN provides administrative services to 21 member organizations in over 100 locations with more than 2,500 end users in private and public health centers that are located in both rural and urban settings. OCHIN's goal is to provide quality health information and management services to the safety-net community. As a collaborative, OCHIN can provide these services more efficiently and effectively than would be possible by individual organizations.

OCHIN was founded in 2000, initially as a department of CareOregon, to address concerns about the impact of an information technology gap in the field of health care. This technology gap, if unchecked, would leave families in poverty with more expensive, less efficient, and less effective care than those with access to mainstream systems of care. Alternatively, the founders of OCHIN envisioned an opportunity to secure significant gains in quality healthcare for populations who have tended to be most neglected by the healthcare system as a whole.

To bridge this technology gap, OCHIN functions as a collaborative, accomplishing together what individual organizations cannot do alone. OCHIN leverages the size of the collaborative to purchase Epic software and seeks every possible avenue to subsidize the cost of the software through grants and foundations with the goal of making practice management and electronic medical records (EMR) affordable for more safety-net clinics to implement and maintain.

OCHIN went through a rigorous process to select and contract with Epic in 2001 and has successfully implemented Epic's practice management system in over 100 community health centers and local health departments in the last five years. Practice management is an important first step in bridging the IT gap in health care. It ensures that the safety-net clinics run as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, allowing lean staffs to give greater attention to health care and less to burdensome paperwork.

Capitalizing on the success of practice management implementations, OCHIN was awarded two Integrated Services Development Initiative (ISDI) grants and a Shared Integrated Management Information Systems (SIMIS) grant that have enabled us to expand our network, further integrate our information systems operations, and implement EMR systems for our Member organizations. We have implemented EMR successfully in several of our clinics and feel it is key to improving the quality of health care for the neediest populations.

Because OCHIN shares one set of hardware, which is considered as one instance of the Epic product and enables all OCHIN clinics to share client health records across multiple organizations, each patient has one health record, regardless of how many safety-net clinics in the OCHIN collaborative see them. This provides disadvantaged patients improved continuity of care and health outcomes while creating a rich aggregate database for research. Designated as an Organized Health Care Arrangement (OHCA), OCHIN is well suited for sharing the one health record structure as clinically indicated or appropriate. (For more information about OHCAs, click here.)

Within the next few years OCHIN will achieve full sustainability, which means that we would no longer require non-operating revenue to subsidize our operations. Until then, OCHIN's strategic plan is to grow, bringing more member organizations into the collaborative while maintaining the quality of existing services.

Safety-net Clinics and How We Work with Them

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) serve America's low income, homeless, and migrant populations by providing primary care services through Medicaid. Legislation enacted in late 1980's designated health centers as FQHC to receive reimbursement based on the reasonable costs of providing services. Prior to designation, community health centers frequently received reimbursement inadequate to cover the actual cost of the services provided.

OCHIN is working to help strengthen the health care safety net through improved information technology and management services. OCHIN's goals are:

• Improved access to healthcare for vulnerable populations by ensuring the viability of the healthcare safety net.
• Collection of more accurate information on uninsured and underinsured populations through a system that integrates practice management, electronic medical records, and a data warehouse.

Click here for the complete history of OCHIN