Kentucky making data on foster children interoperable

Andrew Bledsoe, deputy executive director of Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services, speaks Tuesday at HIMSS25 in Las Vegas.

Photo: Jeff Lagasse/Healthcare Finance News

LAS VEGAS – The Commonwealth of Kentucky saw a need: Foster children often have complex health needs, and in order to more effectively address them, it established the Health Information Data Sharing (KHIDS) initiative, an effort that seeks to ameliorate the lack of health data sharing among vulnerable youths.

Andrew Bledsoe, deputy executive director of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said the need for such an effort was urgent. Currently, there are about 8,300 youth in foster care in Kentucky, with 4,200 falling between the ages of 6 to 18. And the mortality gap is widening: Foster children in the state die at a far faster clip than children who are not in the foster system.

“This is why we’re here doing what we’re doing, and leveraging technology in ways that can support this population,” he said. 

What KHIDS did was to integrate health records into child welfare case management, involving a number of departments under Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Grounded in state law, it authorized Kentucky’s child welfare department to share medical records via the Kentucky Health Information Exchange (KHIE).

Being able to share these records was vital, said Bledsoe, because the health of foster use can be jeopardized if providers have an incomplete representation of their health needs. A case worker may not be aware of necessary medications and have a hard time tracking down health records due to a lack of consolidation and interoperability between providers.

“We have great case workers in our state,” said Bledsoe. “They want to do what’s right, but all of these situations aren’t so easy or direct.”

Implementation of KHIDS occurred through single sign-on and API applications, linking Kentucky’s child welfare information system to KHIE. In 2023, more than 39,000 clinical event notifications were received, providing invaluable health insights to case managers for foster children.

This integration, said Bledsoe, led to effective case management, better planning and decision-making, and meticulous health monitoring. KHIE now shares data with 100% of Kentucky hospitals.

The success of the program was due in part to a multi-agency governance structure overseeing the integration, which allowed for an interconnected, interoperable network of agencies and providers serving the foster care population.

Now, the data is flying: Routine visits, behavioral health encounters, pharmacy services, immunization records and more are now available for this vulnerable subset of the state’s youth population.

“If we can do it, others can do it,” said Bledsoe.

Jeff Lagasse is editor of Healthcare Finance News.
Email: jlagasse@himss.org
Healthcare Finance News is a HIMSS Media publication.