Colorado launches COSHI data-governance work group to coordinate social-health information sharing

The Office of eHealth Innovation and the state eHealth Commission opened a data-governance work group to advise the Colorado Social Health Information Exchange (COSHI), saying the group’s purpose is to guide how social-care information is shared with care coordinators and community partners.

“This is first in the state. In fact, first, I wanna say even the country,” eHealth Commissioner Sofia Jin said during the meeting’s opening, describing the session as an opportunity for state agencies, payers, providers and community members to shape COSHI governance.

Karen Hanneke, data governance lead at the Office of eHealth Innovation (OHAI), gave the presentation that framed COSHI as a multiwave technical and governance effort funded in part through federal Medicaid grant support. Hanneke said the state contracted Resultant in November 2023 to build a unifying architecture, and the project is planned as a modular, vendor‑agnostic effort that OHAI expects to develop over roughly a 10‑year horizon.

Hanneke described COSHI’s early work as two tracks: a statewide unifying architecture and an effort to stand up regional hubs that can interoperate with that architecture. She said the pilot use case has focused on accelerating transitions to home- and community‑based services, and that the next wave will prioritize housing-related data by ingesting Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) feeds and a separate housing intake system referenced in the presentation as managed by the Colorado Department of Local Affairs.

Meeting participants said housing and homelessness are practical first priorities because community providers and regional accountable entities (RAEs) already report fragmentation in those data. Jackie Sievers of Contexture, which provides health-information-exchange services in Colorado, said many community organizations still record resource information on paper and “that separation creates a disconnect” that burdens people seeking services.

The group also discussed 2-1-1 community resource directories. Karen Hanneke said the Mile High United Way 2-1-1 directory is the most complete resource the project identified to date and that COSHI’s current goal is to coordinate and surface the best available data, not to recreate a separate statewide directory. Truman Esmond, enterprise architect for COSHI, summarized the technical approach: “we want the truth to be available, but we recognize there will never be one single source.”

Participants flagged several policy and operational issues for future meetings: how to validate and keep resource directories current; how to coordinate among existing vendors and local inventories (e.g., FindHelp, Unite Us and 2-1-1); how consent management will intersect with data governance (a separate consent initiative is underway); and how to handle especially sensitive categories of data such as incarceration status and reentry dates.

The group reached no formal votes. Meeting organizers said they will consolidate chat feedback from attendees, circulate a summary for review, and invite approximately five community members to join the next meeting. Meetings are scheduled monthly on the third Thursday; organizers said the next session will be Feb. 27 and that agenda materials will be distributed in advance.

The session closed with organizers asking members to prioritize where the work group should focus its attention — governance standards, privacy/interoperability challenges, and specific population scenarios such as housing or reentry — and to submit questions or detail in the group chat for consolidation.