Section 2. (a) The department shall take any action consistent with its role as state lead agency for mobile integrated health services. As the lead agency, the department shall take into consideration relevant standards and criteria developed or adopted by nationally recognized agencies or organizations, and the recommendations of interested stakeholders, including, but not limited to, the statewide mobile integrated health advisory council, established in section 4.

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(b) The department shall evaluate and approve MIH programs that meet the following criteria:

(i) provide pre-hospital and post-hospital services as a coordinated continuum of care that fully supports the patient’s medical needs in the community;

(ii) address gaps in service delivery and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations, or other harmful and wasteful resource delivery;

(iii) focus on partnerships, through contracts or otherwise, between health care providers and health care entities that promote coordination and utilization of existing personnel and resources without duplication of services;

(iv) adhere to clinical standards and protocols, pursuant to this chapter by the department by regulation, with the guidance of the advisory council, to ensure that MIH community paramedic providers or other providers employed by a health care entity provide health care services or treatment within their scope of practice;

(v) dispatch only those community paramedic providers or other providers employed by a health care entity who have received appropriate training and demonstrate competency in the MIH clinical protocols;

(vi) meet appropriate standards related to capacity, location, personnel and equipment;

(vii) provide access to qualified medical control and medical direction;

(viii) provide a secure and effective medical communication subsystem linkage for on-line medical direction;

(ix) ensure activation of the 911 system in the event that a patient of an MIH program experiences a medical emergency, as determined through medical direction, in the course of an MIH visit; provided, however, that the activation shall be in the best interest of patient safety and takes into account how MIH programs affect EMS first response services; and provided further, that the department shall examine how 911 triage assessment tools may be incorporated into MIH;

(x) ensure compliance with all state and federal privacy requirements with regard to patient medical records and other individually identified patient health information; and

(xi) ensure that health care providers operating MIH programs collect and maintain data, including statistics on mortality and morbidity of consumers of mobile integrated health services, including, but not limited to, information needed to review access, availability, quality, cost and third party reimbursement for such services and coordinate and perform the data collection in conjunction with other data-collection activities.