State denies MyHealth protest over bid process for health information exchange | Govt-and-politics | tulsaworld.com
There are some extremely disturbing details in the follow up article from the Tulsa World. Look at who all endorsed the local company. There is no excuse for this. Republican leadership just took a giant dump on a local, Oklahoma-based company for reasons the tax payers won't get. Most likely getting political favors. This is as Swampy as it gets.
Here's a bit from the above article:
"In November, Gov. Kevin Stitt announced that he had launched an effort to find a vendor for a health information exchange the state was designing
because “Oklahoma has struggled for a decade to establish statewide interoperability with this data.”
A Jan. 19 opposition letter
from 13 major entities contends that the
state’s current course “will diminish the existing private sector HIE success, incur significant and unnecessary costs to taxpayers, and negatively impact the state’s HIE infrastructure, which could pose significant health and safety risks to patients.”
The entities backing the joint letter are the
Tulsa Regional Chamber; Oklahoma City Chamber; State Chamber of Oklahoma; Hillcrest HealthCare System; Ascension St. John; Integris Health; Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma; Cherokee Nation Health Services; Choctaw Nation; Chickasaw Nation; Red Rock Behavioral Health; Oklahoma State Medical Association; and Oklahoma Association of Optometric Physicians.
In a Jan. 6 email to state officials,
the federal office that helps orchestrate the nation’s health information technology efforts
described MyHealth as “an exemplar” in using information for the public good. It expressed concern the state’s decision will “shut down MyHealth’s extraordinary work” to start from scratch a state-operated HIE."
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