The Children’s Partnership (TCP) is leading a six-month public/private collaboration to develop a Strategic Plan for providing a Personal Health Record (PHR) system to children and youth in foster care and linking it to the broader health information exchange (HIE) initiatives currently underway in California. With its partners, TCP will convene subject matter experts, communities of interest, and appropriate state staff to examine the feasibility and lay out the specific steps that are required to meet the following goals:

• Develop a robust, useful PHR system that reaches all children and youth in foster care, and their caregivers as appropriate, consistent with the State’s HIE Cooperative Agreement;

• Exchange data across unaffiliated organizations, distinct electronic health record (EHR) systems, and this new PHR system, consistent with national HIE priorities;

• Populate the individual’s PHR with relevant information automatically downloaded from available electronic resources, including Medi-Cal claims data, immunization records, and other key state public health and child welfare data, consistent with privacy and security protections; and

• Facilitate the state’s effort to strengthen oversight of psychotropic medication use among children and youth in foster care, consistent with the US Department of Health and Human Services State Medicaid Director’s Letter dated November 23, 2011.

As no other state has developed a PHR for children and youth in foster care as part of its larger HIE system, this is largely uncharted territory and will position California to be a leader nationally. The Strategic Plan will identify and recommend a governance structure, specific interoperability requirements, financing and sustainability approaches, and necessary legislative and administrative remedies to address legal and policy issues specific to the foster care population. The Plan will be developed to specifically address these issues with respect to the HealthShack PHR system, and will also look more broadly at other available, relevant PHRs as appropriate. The project will also include a preliminary assessment of the complex challenges related to confidentiality and privacy, which will inform future efforts to address these issues. A key component of the Plan will be to define the core features and data elements of the PHR and sources from which the data will be drawn to populate the PHR. 

Download the PHR Strategic Plan  (PDF)

Download slides from the presentation Expanding the Use of a Personal Health Record (PHR) System to California's Foster Care Population (PPT)