Posted By Monique Dever On October 16, 2014
What’s happening with Title X Family Planning?
The Title X Family Planning program, originally established as Title X of the Public Health Service Act in 1970, is a federal grant program dedicated to providing low-income individuals with comprehensive family planning services based on their ability to pay.
Title X clinical service providers include state, county and local health departments, community centers, Planned Parenthood centers, and private non-profits. The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs (OPA) fund a network of over 4400 centers that service over 5 million clients annually. Funding includes both clinical services as well as programs for improving the quality of the services such as personnel training, research, and education and outreach programs.
With the onset of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems and easier exchange of data, OPA is working with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) on a new profile using the established Retrieve Form for Data Capture (RFD) for Family Planning.
OPA’s strategic plan is to build a performance-oriented interoperable system that can:
- Increase the quality of data collected
- Decrease the burden of reporting
- Interface easily with other Health IT systems.
Aligning clinical data elements to pre-populate the RFD with structured value sets, can be mapped to Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) to facilitate vendor adoption. The data collected is compiled into the Family Planning Annual Report (FPAR). Is your EHR keeping up with these changes?
The urgency is now on the integration of an EHR system that can speed the process of OPA’s plan. With this goal in mind, OPA has awarded $4.1 million of grants to Title X clinics in 2013 for the purpose of EHR adoption, billing and quality improvements, and enable meaningful use attestation.
For further information on Title X visit http://www.hhs.gov/opa/title-x-family-planning/and http://www.hhs.gov/opa/pdfs/opa-vendor-outreach.pdf.