*Department of Veterans Affairs
*Scripps Health
*General Services Administration
*HHS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
*HHS, Maternal and Child Health Bureau
*HHS, National Library of Medicine
*HHS, Head Start Bureau
*USDA Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services
*USDA/FNCS/Women, Infants & Children
*Pasteur Merieux Connaught
*Pfizer
*Shering-Plough
*AstraZeneca
*Johnson & Johnson
*Merck
* Glaxo-Wellcome
* PhRMA
*The States of Nevada, North Dakota, and Wyoming
*Inter-tribal Council of Nevada
*Over a dozen local services providers

With the Health Passport Project, the Western Governors’ Association has brought together key public and private partners to pioneer a new way of facilitating the delivery of health-care services with long-term benefits not only for the West, but nationally and internationally. The goal is to enable cost effective and integrated health-care information and thus deliver a higher quality of care and improve public health.

To achieve this goal, the Health Passport Project is developing and testing the use of a smart card based system to allow near instantaneous access to critical health data, while improving privacy and security. The cards will be used by individuals for portable identification and personal health management purposes and for secure Internet access to the growing number of Web-based health services. Providers and insurers may use the cards to authenticate eligibility, access appropriate records such as blood type and immunizations and manage health and financial records. Health Passport cards are expected to become a major tool to assist in the delivery of health care and health benefits following a successful two-phase demonstration.

The Health Passport is the first-of-its-kind field demonstration to see how electronic cards can facilitate health information sharing among health and human service agencies and administrative efficiency among public and private health-care providers and nutrition programs. The primary participants are lower income working families who have to manage multiple eligibility systems and gateways to obtain child health care such as Medicaid, Kid Care, Immunization, Head Start, WIC, and Maternal and Child Health services.

The Health Passport is designed to:

enable common data sharing among multiple organizations through the updated smart card the parent is carrying;

streamline access and delivery of health-care services;

share costs across partners who all utilize the same electronic service platform; and

provide value to the patient/client in managing child health services.

Phase I Pilot Status

North Dakota

The Bismarck site is fully operational with some 3,000 cards in use by parents who are receiving services by all providers: WIC, Immunization, Public Health, Med Center One, and Head Start. The HPP Card microchip carries the health data, and the card’s magnetic stripe carries the Medicaid service authorization. Local partners have come together and established standards that are being accepted by all partners.

Wyoming

Cheyenne has three of its four program operating with 1,700 cards in use. The City/County Public Health Department started with the integrated immunization records application. Head Start is operating and the Cheyenne Children’s Clinic, with over 1,000 records, was launched last December. WIC and Food Stamps started operating in March 2001. This county is also examining how the new "Kid Care" legislation can ride on the Health Passport Card, the same way Medicaid works in Bismarck

Nevada

The Reno field demonstration launched June 2, 2000.  It is focusing on Immunization, Head Start, and WIC.  The Nevada Inter Tribal Council is participating in the pilot too. This field demonstration is significant because it represents the transfer of the Wyoming WIC Electronic Benefit Transfer System to Reno and the Inter Tribal Council and because the majority of participants will have Spanish as the primary language and culture.  There are 13,000 cards in use in Reno.

WGA is working in partnership with the General Services Administration, Scripps Health, the California WIC program, and others to demonstrate a smart card (electronic service platform) that operates in concert with Web-based services. This "card of the future" project will broaden the applicability of the Health Passport System by providing a single Web-based application to view medical and financial records, while ensuring complete privacy and security for the client. These features include a common security mechanism for multiple public uses (i.e. extending across levels of government and programs) and secure exchange of confidential health records between private providers, and state and federal agencies. The card will be an identification and authentication vehicle, an access vehicle to Internet-based services, a personal and portable repository of critical information and a tool to help manage various health and benefit programs.

In summary, the demonstration will develop and test the concept of a Web-based "patient account" as well as the practicality of using the card to bridge multiple systems. Phase II of the Demonstration will include two applications: