Since 2013, we’ve worked with more than 75 leading organizations building new approaches to healthy communities. In the first half of 2023 our programs and collaborations fostered connections between more than 500 partners, reaching 7 million or more people.

Designing care and social supports for the most vulnerable

In Alameda County in California, we helped design and implement a comprehensive social health information exchange that enables community-level data sharing, real-time collaboration, and analytics. The goal was supporting low-resourced residents with the most acute needs across the health and social system of care.

Our work in Alameda County showcased our comprehensive approach to technology design and implementation. Intrepid Ascent helped design a comprehensive data privacy framework and guided the technology design to allow health and social care providers — both HIPAA-covered and non-HIPAA-covered entities — to access patient health and social service data, based on patient consent and applicable law. We supported the onboarding and training of participants and led a diverse set of 56 organizations and more than 2,000 users. Integral to this work was our comprehensive technology implementation approach, which keeps the user voice at the center and encourages systems that are designed with people in mind.

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Evolving Medicaid for whole person care

States around the country are experimenting with approaches to whole person care that serves the needs of Medicaid members. One aspect of Intrepid Ascent’s work in California involves managing the implementation of the Behavioral Health Quality Improvement Program with Merced, Santa Cruz, and Stanislaus counties; this includes the management of counties’ health information exchange onboarding and technology implementation, vendor management, data interoperability, and data governance solutions.

In addition, we’re facilitating Collaborative Planning and Implementation groups in Contra Costa and San Diego counties that support the redesign of the health and social service system to better meet the needs of Medicaid members. This involves helping health and social service organizations overcome systemic issues while creating a more holistic, coordinated system of care.

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Connecting communities to address social determinants of health

Intrepid Ascent supported the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island (HWCLI) with its approach for connecting community-based organizations to address social determinants of health during New York’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) effort. Our contributions focused on understanding the collaboration needs of community-based organizations, mapping these to technology and governance options, designing a stakeholder engagement plan to facilitate change, and defining impact goals to gauge project success. This work led to the procurement and implementation of a social service referral platform in the social service spectrum of care. Intrepid Ascent is now building on this effort to support HWCLI in its goal of serving as a Social Care Network through New York’s next 1115 Medicaid waiver.

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Surveying California’s health network environment

The California Health Care Foundation
August 2021

In a 2021 report published by the California Health Care Foundation, several Intrepid Ascent thought leaders wrote about regional health information exchange (HIE) activity in California along with Jill Yegian, Ph.D., principal of Yegian Health Insights. The report highlights four different HIE types, including those that contain EHR-centered clinical data, health information organization data, specialized data, and whole person data. The co-authors included publicly available information and the insights of 20 statewide and regional leaders in Los Angeles County, Fresno County and its environs, the Sacramento metropolitan area, and Humboldt County.

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Highlighting California’s health network types

The California Health Care Foundation
August 2021

This 2021 issue brief written by Mark Elson, Ph.D., CEO of Intrepid Ascent, and published by the California Health Care Foundation provides an overview of health information exchange network types and characteristics in California. The four network types include EHR-centered clinical data exchange, health information organization–centered clinical data exchange, specialized clinical data exchange networks, and whole person data exchange networks. The report addresses the overlapping nature of these networks while observing that — absent further progress and alignment — these networks leave significant gaps that contribute to fragmented services for most Californians.

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