The Covisint division of Compuware Corp. is the belle of the ball this week in the state-level health information technology business.
It’s teamed with AT&T on a contract to build a statewide clinical information network in Tennessee and with Northrop Grumman on a bid for a comparable contract in Utah.
Covisint, which was created as an online marketplace for auto parts suppliers, brings to the table its secure, on-demand systems capabilities, including secure messaging, data aggregation and identity management.
Because of its roots in working with a consortium of major auto makers, it has technology that can let competitors feel comfortable about sharing certain information and keeping other information off the network, said Brett Furst, Covasint’s vice president of health care.
In the case of regional health information organizations and larger health information exchanges, competition among health care providers sometimes is an obstacle to collaboration, Furst said. “We insulate them” from one another, he said, while enabling disparate applications to communicate when communication is desired.
In the company’s bid with Northrop Grumman, that company will fill the classic systems integrator role, managing the project and getting the parties working together, Furst said. Northrop Grumman also has more experience with state agencies and public/private partnerships.
Robert Cothren, who directs Northrop Grumman’s clinical information systems division, said he believes much of the public-sector activity in building HIEs will be at the state level in the coming months and years.
Reeling off a list of states that may be looking for systems integrators soon, Cothren said that “if [the Nationwide Health Information Network] is going to be successful, then the building blocks at the state level are going to have to be part of that.”
“Our intent is to develop a solution and a partnership [with Covisint] that we would use as a solution for other state initiatives as well,” Cothren said.
Furst said the two companies plan to partner on more business at the state level.
In the Tennessee partnership, AT&T is the prime, and the HIE will be built on top of the company’s backbone network in the state, Furst said.
The program will leverage a rural health care grant from the Federal Communications Commission, he added.
Covisint, like its partners, now has a growing health IT business. In fact, health care is one of the fastest-growing segments of the company’s business.
One advantage Furst cited with the company’s service-oriented architecture and on-demand model is that network users can pay for the services on a monthly or per-transaction basis, reducing the need for states to come up with large amounts of capital to build a statewide HIE.
Northrop Grumman was one of the four prime contractors under the initial NHIN program, and it continues to do health IT work for the Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services departments and the Military Health System.
Utah has long operated a network for administrative transactions and is now looking to increase the amount of clinical information that is shared among providers, he said.
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.
