Financial Assistance From The Assistance Fund Now Available for Eligible People Living With Rett Syndrome
ORLANDO, Fla., May 1, 2023 (Newswire.com)
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The Assistance Fund, an independent charitable patient assistance organization that helps patients and families facing high medical out-of-pocket costs, today announced the launch of a new financial assistance program for people living with Rett syndrome. The program is designed to help eligible individuals pay for their out-of-pocket medical expenses related to Rett syndrome, such as copays, health insurance premiums, therapy administration costs, disease management such as prescribing-physician copayments, treatment-related travel costs, diagnostic laboratory tests, and genetic testing.
"People living with Rett syndrome face severe challenges that affect nearly every aspect of their lives," said Melissa Kennedy, CEO at the International Rett Syndrome Foundation. "I'm thankful to The Assistance Fund for opening this door to treatment for families and its longtime commitment to the rare disease community."
Rett syndrome is a rare neurological and developmental disorder impacting mostly female babies and infants. Common symptoms, including loss of hand and verbal skills, most often appear in the first two years. People living with Rett syndrome require a complex series of treatments to manage the condition and improve their quality of life.[1]
"While a diagnosis of Rett syndrome can be devastating for families with young children, access to medication and therapy can mitigate symptoms and improve their quality of life," said Gerald Lauria, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at The Assistance Fund. "We are tremendously grateful to our generous donors for enabling us to open our new Rett Syndrome Financial Assistance Program and help so many families in need."
To learn more or determine eligibility for financial support, visit tafcares.org or call (855) 509-2452 to speak with a Patient Advocate.
A list of all the disease programs available from The Assistance Fund can be found on the website tafcares.org.
About The Assistance Fund
The Assistance Fund (TAF) is an independent charitable patient assistance organization that helps patients and families facing high medical out-of-pocket costs by providing financial assistance for their copayments, coinsurance, deductibles, and other health-related expenses. The Assistance Fund currently manages more than 80 disease programs, each of which covers all the FDA-approved medications that treat a specific disease named in the disease program. Since its founding in 2009, TAF has helped nearly 180,000 children and adults access the treatment they need to stay healthy or manage a life-threatening, chronic, or rare disease. To learn more about The Assistance Fund, or for information on how to donate, please visit tafcares.org.
A rigorous evaluation process led to Smile Digital Health becoming the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services' data fabric partner of choice to meet the interoperability needs for health data utility.
TORONTO, August 16, 2023 (Newswire.com)
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Smile Digital Health (Smile), a leading Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) health data fabric and exchange solutions provider, today announced a partnership with the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) on the implementation of its next-generation health information exchange (HIE) platform. MiHIN is leveraging Smile's Health Data Fabric (HDF) in this next phase of its digital transformation.
MiHIN is Michigan's non-profit state-designated HIE, providing critical and comprehensive patient information to doctors, clinics, federally qualified health centers, hospitals, pharmacies, health insurance providers, and public health in Michigan. Over the last 15 years, MiHIN has set the national standard for building health information networks in an equitable and sustainable manner.
Smile's HDF enables field-leading next-generation HIEs, offering best-in-class security, scalability, performance, composability and innovation acceleration tools. MiHIN will use Smile to future-proof its modernization investment by building an open standards ecosystem and cloud native computing. Along with Smile's robust privacy and security certifications, its scalability allows for MiHIN to enhance services to its Michigan customers and fast-track growth for MiHIN's national subsidiary HIE network operated by Velatura Public Benefit Corporation. MiHIN and Velatura will use its new FHIR advanced HDF from Smile to enable new and advance data sharing use cases and analytics services that will assist in the transformation of care and support Velatura's gateway hub as part of the national Patient Centered Data Home (PCDH) initiative.
"Enabling meaningful health data sharing hinges on open standards, freeing information from silos and fostering seamless integration between data and care," said Dr. Tim Pletcher, Executive Director of MiHIN. "Smile's steadfast dedication to open standards perfectly aligns with MiHIN's unwavering drive to establish a forward-looking and market-responsive HIE, facilitating the seamless integration of clean, actionable data, real-time quality measures, point-of-care clinical insights, and more."
MiHIN had to consider many necessary attributes when planning the modernization of its HIE and how Smile could support the transformations. Smile's event-driven design was a requirement to enable real-time data exchange and updates. MiHIN also needed Smile's open standards-based platform to ensure seamless interoperability between the healthcare ecosystem stakeholders and data utilizers.
"Quality healthcare requires quality data and insights to ensure positive patient and population health outcomes. MiHIN's use-case factory and equitable business models are a perfect match for our FHIR data platform to ensure the safe, just-in-time, delivery of contextualized information wherever the patient chooses to get their care. This move ensures that they can scale with growing data volumes due to increasing demands as they grow with Velatura," said Shane McNamee, MD, Chief Growth Officer, Smile Digital Health. "A next-generation HIE will significantly improve healthcare data exchange and overall patient care. We're proud to play a crucial part in MiHIN's continuing digital transformation."
Mary Lantin, General Manager of Availity Clinical Solutions, commented, "So many of today's, and tomorrow's, critical healthcare initiatives require the use of FHIR data. As a long-time technology partner to MiHIN, we are delighted to continue to support MiHIN's best-of-breed FHIR strategy in cooperation with Smile Digital Health. Availity Fusion for clinical data upcycling, and proven and scalable FHIR conversion and FHIR streaming, ensures that data that is delivered to patients and providers is the highest quality possible."
For those interested in more details on modernizing an HIE through FHIR open standards, contact Smile Digital Health or book a meeting to chat at Civitas.
About Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services
The Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) is Michigan's state-designated entity for the technical, legal, secure, and private exchange of health information. Breaking down disparate and siloed data systems, the digital network is dedicated to transforming the healthcare experience, improving quality, decreasing cost and solving for health. MiHIN is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, socio-technical collaboration that includes the State of Michigan, Health Information Exchanges, health systems, hospitals, care providers, behavioral health clinics, FQHCs, PIHPs, health plans/payers, pharmacies, post-acute care, hospices, and the Governor's Health Information Technology Commission. For more information, visit https://mihin.org.
About Smile Digital Health
Smile Digital Health is a health information technology company focused on delivering better global health through open standards. Our enterprise-grade, open framework data fabric and integration platform fuels healthcare's digital transformation and accelerates value creation across all patient journeys at scale. Powered by our HL7® FHIR® standard-based clinical data repository (#SmileInside), our platform enables collaboration and allows organizations to ingest, transform, store, enrich, analyze, aggregate and meaningfully share the health information to power digital transformation. We prepare healthcare providers, payers, researchers and life sciences organizations for a connected future beyond legacy systems, adding new value through the intelligent use of information, and ultimately delivering better patient outcomes. For more information, visit SmileDigitalHealth.com.
Contact Information:
Victoria Valladolid
Director of Marketing, Smile Digital Health pr@smiledigitalhealth.com
(877) 537-3343 x 728
Emily Mata
Director of Public Relations, Michigan Health Information Network emily.mata@mihin.org
(517) 745-8835