Healthy Connections

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Strengthening Care through Health Information Technology

The Colorado Health Foundation’s vision is that Colorado will be the healthiest state in the nation. Through our Healthy Connections initiative, our goal is to improve access to high-quality, coordinated health care by strengthening the use of technology among providers that serve low-income, uninsured Coloradans. Healthy Connections was launched in 2007, and the first year of the program included grants of nearly $2.5 million to 21 organizations around the state. Healthy Connections will continue to provide support to eligible providers and organizations through 2010, with an additional $6 million in funding available. 

Learn more about our latest Request for Proposals.

Making the Case for HIT
In 2005 we asked these providers, through interviews and surveys, to tell us more about their current technological capabilities and the potential for HIT to serve as a tool to improve access to quality health care.  The results of the study indicated tremendous potential for HIT to help make providers more efficient, to improve coordination of care, to monitor chronic disease and to increase the field’s ability to understand and address health issues across our communities and populations. View the full report

We also learned that purchasing, implementing and using HIT to its fullest capacity is not easy for these health care organizations that are often run on a “shoe string.”  In addition to being a new and complex field, HIT requires a significant investment of financial resources in technology, staff time needed for assessment, planning and implementation. But we are convinced this is a worthwhile investment of the Foundation’s resources.

Healthy Connections is more than just a grantmaking program. It provides technical assistance, peer learning, support for grant recipients, and dissemination of new information.  Healthy Connections supports organizations who are just beginning to consider how HIT can support their missions, as well as those that are “on the cutting edge” of HIT implementation. In addition to assisting individual clinics, this initiative will advance the field of HIT as a whole.