Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm launched an initiative last week to create a statewide health information network.
She convened a group of 300 stakeholders from the health care, information technology, insurance, consumer protection and other sectors to help create an interoperable Michigan Health Information Network (MHIN) that will enable the exchange of electronic medical records.
The state’s Community Health and IT departments are spearheading the initiative.
“Banking, manufacturing and virtually all other industries have utilized information technology to expedite processes, improve quality and garner efficiencies,” said Janet Olszewski, director of the Michigan Department of Community Health, in a press release. “Health care in Michigan needs to make the same important leap forward.”
CyberMichigan, a division of the nonprofit Altarum Institute, received a $190,000 federal grant to help with the initial design, said T.J. Bucholz, spokesman for the community health department.
He said the stakeholders have been divided into work groups to determine the timeline of the network’s development and other information.
“One of the principal aims of the MHIN is to ensure that, as these [local health IT] initiatives multiply across the state, they are bound together by a common understanding of how data is to be shared, when it is to be shared and with what privacy protections it is to be shared,” said CyberMichigan’s president, Karen Bantel, in the press release.
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.
