News and Resources from CDC, NACDD and National Partners
From NACDD CVH Team
Community eConnect: How to Achieve Successful Bi-Directional Electronic Referrals
Six states are currently utilizing their Year 1 funding to implement Community e-Connect, and NACDD would like to offer the opportunity to additional states for Year 2. Information is available here.
Community e-Connect is a bi-directional linkage between clinical electronic health records (EHRs) and community-based organizations (CBOs). Clinical providers electronically refer patients with diabetes, pre-diabetes, or hypertension to CBOs with programs that can help control these conditions. In turn, CBOs document a patient’s enrollment, their attendance and progress, and electronically send this information back to the clinical provider, where it goes directly into the patient’s EHR.
Using this system, sites in Massachusetts were able to show a sustained decrease in systolic blood pressure of 3.4 mm Hg for patients who received services in community settings compared to a matched sample of patients whose blood pressure was “out of control”. By the standards of the American Heart Association, these interventions were “highly cost effective.”
Community e-Connect directly supports the following strategies and activities outlined in CDC-RFA-DP18-1815PPHF18: