ICC Projects

Since its inception, the ICC has worked to develop a system of care in central Texas, and to invest in strategies to accomplish this.

• MPI/CDR, also known as I-Care
  A Master Patient Index/Clinical Data Repository through which safety net providers build shared longitudinal electronic health records for uninsured and other low income patients to improve care continuity and delivery.
• Medicaider/Case Tracker
  A common eligibility program through which uninsured central Texas residents are screened for eligibility for medical assistance and charitable programs.
• Pharmacy
  Pharmacy strategies, through which lower cost and free drugs are made available for low-income patients.

In our Library, information about each of these strategies is updated in presentation slide packets.
By mid-2004, we had achieved important milestones in the first two areas:

• We had included over 300,000 patients and one million encounters in our I-Care system.
• We were adding 10,000 encounters per week from over 30 hospital, clinic, and physician network locations.
• We had our first 100 clinical users of our I-Care system.
• We had screened our first 100,000 uninsured patients for medical assistance programs.
• We were screening over 6,000 patients per month in over 30 clinical locations.
• We had found approximately 11% of central Texas uninsured patients to be eligible for medical assistance programs, had assisted almost 2,000 of them to become enrolled, and had generated over $2 million in new revenue to safety net providers.

Our strategies were developed with the assistance of four significant grants and awards:

1. A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Communities in Charge grant of $700,000 that supported general system development from 2000-2003.
2. A HRSA CAP/HCAP grant of nearly $2 million that supported the development of MPI/CDR and Medicaider programs from 2000-2003.
3. A grant from Ascension Health, of $900,000, that matched the first HRSA HCAP grant.
4. A second HRSA HCAP grant of $2 million to support pharmacy initiatives from 2003-2006.

More information about the ICC initiatives and other similar initiatives from around the country can be found at the Communities in Charge website (www.communitiesincharge.org), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website (www.rwjf.org), the Federal HRSA website (www.hrsa.gov), and, for those with passwords, the HCAP website, (www.capcommunity.hrsa.gov).

The ICC is one of the founding members of the Central Texas Health Data Collaborative (CTHDC). The goal of the CTHDC is to improve access health-related, data-oriented information specific to ten counties in Central Texas. (http://www.centexhealthdata.org)