Despite the region having a $2,400 higher per capita patient care cost than other regions of the country, the region has extremely poor health outcomes, said executive director Liesa Jenkins.

CareSpark’s mission, to improve the health status for the region, is being carried out through interoperable electronic health record adoption and regional health information exchange, or HIE, platform development on the healthcare IT side.

“Value is derived from better medical decisions,” Jenkins said, and both clinician and payer understand that.

CareSpark has developed clinical decision support services that the RHIO will deliver at the point of care. Payers and employers enroll their members and employees, respectively, to receive those services when visiting their physicians. “Payers said, if you could do that with clinical and claims data, we’ll pay for it,” said Jenkins.

The Lovelace Clinic Foundation, a health services research organization based in Albuquerque, N.M., got 30 community partners together to develop an HIE network that includes a master patient index, a record locator service and a patient referral service.