Contact: Center for Improving Value in Health Care
Email: ColoradoAPCD@civhc.org
The Scalable Architecture for Federated Translational Inquiries Network (SAFTINet) is a multi-state consortium of stakeholders dedicated to generating, implementing and disseminating evidence to enhance the quality and value of health care for safety net and underserved patient populations. SAFTINet has developed an information technology infrastructure designed to securely share electronic health data to support quality improvement and research.
A key goal of SAFTINet is to obtain identified Medicaid claims data for the patients cared for in participating organizations and deliver that data to these partners so that it can be linked with patient data from electronic health records, using SAFTINet-developed technology. Importantly, those who will have access to the identified data are the health care providers for these patients (they are HIPAA covered entities), and have access to fully identified clinical data for these patients. Those seeking to use the linked clinical and claims data for research purposes (e.g., University of Colorado investigators) will have access to limited data sets only, and must have Data Use Agreements and IRB approvals.
The vision for this network is that it will support a broad array of data uses; current quality improvement includes development of improved quality metrics using both clinical and claims data sources. Current research concerns the effects of health care delivery models such as the patient-centered medical home on chronic disease outcomes, such as emergency department utilization among patients with asthma.