FEATURED CASE STUDY

Situation

The Connecticut Office of Health Strategies has a mission to promote equal access to high quality health care, control costs and ensure better health for the people of Connecticut. 

In 2021, bolstered by a once-in-a-generation infusion of federal funds, Connecticut embarked on developing a 5-year Health IT plan to strengthen their public health infrastructure.

At the center of this plan was a desire to share sensitive data without compromising privacy, to eliminate barriers to healthcare, provide timely information between provider types, and to enable person-centered care that lets patients know they really matter.

AIM served as the chief quantitative research contractor responsible for completing a Draft Environmental Scan Report for the state of Connecticut.

Approach

Over the course of seven months, AIM worked collaboratively with client teams and consulting partners to isolate information and perspectives needed to inform survey strategies, and ultimately, the final strategic plan itself. AIM garnered electronic survey responses from 1,200 health and human service organizations to understand how they collect, share and use data related to the populations they serve, and the types of improvements they would like to see involving policies, guidance, technical assistance, regulations and collaboration. 

Respondents were asked to rank the barriers to Connecticut’s health technology and exchange of data, and to provide perspectives on workforce and technical assistance needs, security, privacy, and managing consent for sharing sensitive and protected data.

AIM’s quantitative surveys and analysis provided team members leading other areas of research with concrete comparisons across stakeholder groups and a critical context for interpreting broader implications and meaning.

Outcomes

At the outset of this project, the State recognized that its IT structure was poorly leveraging the scale of their 27,000-person organization. The information AIM gathered on technology views, risks, skills concerns, and spending was instrumental both independently and in concert with other bodies of research collected by AIM’s partner consulting group. Collectively, the research informed six key recommendation areas addressing health information privacy, prescription drug monitoring program expansion, electronic health records adoption, Health and Human Service agencies service coordination, and data integration, and strategies for using Connie, Connecticut’s health information exchange.

View the final 2021 Strategic Plan HERE.