ORLANDO, Fla. -- Twenty federal agencies are moving to develop a health information exchange network with a shared connection to the Nationwide Health Information Network.
Dr. Robert Kolodner, national coordinator for health information technology, announced the effort, known as the NHIN-Connect Gateway or NHIN-C, at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society conference.
Vish Sankaran, Federal Health Architecture program director in Kolodner’s office, said his agency expects to select a contractor to develop the federal network in March, and development work should be complete by year’s end.
All the agencies generate or use health information in the course of their work, Sankaran said. Another half-dozen agencies are contributing expertise and other resources.
The latest addition to the joint effort is the Social Security Administration, Kolodner said. He said SSA recognizes the potential for health IT to reduce the costs and delays it incurs when it seeks to obtain between 15 million and 20 million medical records from doctors and other health care providers each year in support of its disability determinations.
The connection with SSA will be a one-way pipe to deliver the records from sources across the nation, Kolodner told a reporter.
The NHIN-C program will begin with an existing interagency health information exchange effort, the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange between the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs that supports coordination of care for wounded warriors, Sankaran said.
SSA, VA and other agencies that need to retrieve medical records from outside providers will constitute the next phase, he said, and others will follow by December.
Besides building the NHIN-C Gateway, the contractor will deliver a software development kit that will enable agencies to connect their systems to the gateway.
The program will implement approved HIE standards and also will seek to reuse components of existing federal or federally sponsored health information networks such as the Public Health Information Network and the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, Sankaran said.
Although agencies’ first reaction to taking part in the NHIN-C was to ask how they could justify the investment, he said, they have come to realize that the project could help them achieve long-sought-after goals in areas such as situational awareness, emergency response and post-market monitoring of drugs, to name a few examples.
Like BHIE development, the NHIN-C program is committed to an incremental approach, Sankaran said, and he expects it to develop for some time to come. The program’s motto is “shared development and nonshared deployment,” he added, saying that different agencies will opt for different implementations within their own IT environments.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
