ONC taps info exchange software for NHIN Connect
By John Moore
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Office of the National Coordinator has tapped an Arlington, Va.company’s health information exchange software as part of the federally developed Connect Gateway.
ONC selected Vangent’s Health Information Exchange Open Source (HIEOS) software as a document sharing component of Connect Gateway v. 2.2, which was released late last month. Connect lets agencies and healthcare organizations share health data, employing nationwide health information network (NHIN) protocols, agreements and services.
A document on the Connect community portal describes HIEOS as the “chosen NHIN Connect document registry and repository components for enterprise-type installations for this release.”
Kerry Weems, senior vice president for health strategy at Vangent, said HIEOS aims to let healthcare organizations use the systems they already have in place.
“Our strategy isn’t going to be rip and replace,” he said. “We are going to connect you to the NHIN and help you ensure meaningful use of the products you have.”
HIEOS can interoperate with electronic health record systems and integration engines through Web services interfaces, noted Bernie Thuman, chief technology officer for Vangent’s Health Solutions division.
Healthcare providers use integration engines to manage linkages among in-house systems, data sources and external applications.
Beyond its use in Connect, HIEOS will be offered to government agencies, hospitals, and regional health information organizations as part of Vangent’s open architecture-based health information exchange solution, according to the company.
HIEOS is written in Java and runs within the open source GlassFish application server environment. Thuman said the software can run on any server platform that supports Java.
