The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has added a 10th health information exchange – this one composed of federal health care providers -- to the slate of nine HIEs recently chosen to demonstrate regional trials of a national health information network (NHIN).
The federal “national HIE” would comprise the Indian Health Service offices, Defense Department treatment facilities and Veterans Affairs Department medical centers and clinics, said John Loonsk, director of ONCHIT’s Office of Interoperability and Standards. He spoke at a Nov. 13 meeting of the American Health Information Community in Chicago.
The addition of the federal organizations reflects Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt’s vision of a NHIN “based on national standards but with local control,” Loonsk said. The federal and regional HIEs would operate on identical standards for interoperability, he added.
Liesa Jenkins, executive director of the Tennessee-based CareSpark, one of the HIEs chosen in the NHIN trial, said she welcomed the federal involvement. Since its inception, CareSpark “has been interested in what it can do to connect with the VA medical center for our region which is a partner to us,” she said.
Other HIEs have also expressed interest in joining the trial demonstrations, Loonsk said. ONCHIT will seek opportunities to include them in the project.
“Our target is to increase the value of connecting up and participating,” he said. “Opportunities in the big tent of the NHIN” include integrated delivery systems in addition to health data banks that provide “health information exchange services for the broader network.”
ONCHIT has identified four core services that support the network, Loonsk said. They include patient look-up services, information routing and delivery, consumer access controls, and providing electronic data for reporting and analytical uses.
ONCHIT has given some of the HIEs responsibility to lead working groups in key functional areas during the trial.
The core content working group will be led by the Lovelace Clinic Foundation in New Mexico and the New York eHealth Colllaborative.The core technical and security working group will he headed by the West Virginia Health Information Network and the Federal NHIE.
Data use and reciprocal support would be led by the North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance and MedVirginia from central Virginia.
“By the end of the first year’s performance, we will have removed the technical obstacles to health information exchange between the HIEs,” Loonsk said.
“We will have HIEs that can demonstrate the exchange of live data and will have shown they can implement these building blocks.”
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
