New York's participation in trial demonstrations now taking place of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) will help the state advance its internal health information technology strategy, according to officials.

That's the view of officials with the New York eHealth Collaborative, which was awarded one of a second round of contracts to health information exchanges in October 2007 to test operations of the NHIN at the local and regional level.

A technical interoperability demonstration, conducted in June, was a key deliverable under that contract. The demo involved the exchange of patient data between two regional health information organizations: the New York Clinical Information Exchange (NYCLIX) and the Long Island Patient Information Exchange (LIPIX).

Next month, the New York eHealth Collaborative, along with other NHIN contractors, will demonstrate NHIN core services at the American Health Information Community meeting in Washington.

Although New York's technical demonstration met the requirements of the NHIN trial, it also provides the state insight into its own infrastructure rollout, said Rachel Block, executive director of the New York eHealth Collaborative. The statewide health information network for New York, or SHIN-NY, will serve as the technical component of the state's health information infrastructure.

The state's NHIN work lets the state get a better handle on the technical requirements for interoperability, Block said. "NHIN has advanced that understanding," she said.

As a result, the state can take the resources it developed for NHIN and plug them into the state's own efforts at collaborative interoperability, Block added. "The idea is to do a statewide technical interoperability network across providers and RHIOs," she said. "That is a major focus of our activities today."

The interoperability demonstration involved the two-way exchange of medical history data between Manhattan-based NYCLIX and Long Island's LIPIX. During the demo, a nursing supervisor from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York was able to conduct a query from the NYCLIX side and retrieve a patient's clinical summary from the LIPIX side.

The patient's records were housed in the North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System. Conversely, an attending physician with that health system was able to obtain a clinical patient summary from the NYCLIX side.

LIPIX uses InterSystems technology solution, while NYCLIX uses MedPlus.

The demonstration involved using NHIN specifications for subject discovery, query and retrieve, and back-office processes relative to audit logging, said Tom Silvious, a CSC Healthcare sector employee who serves as the New York eHealth Collaborative's solutions architect for NHIN projects.