The four contractor teams that have spent the last year building prototypes of the National Health Information Network strutted their stuff today, showing how their systems could locate records of patients from distant cities and collect those records for use in improving patient care.
It was a live, public demonstration of the potential of a NHIN to bridge information gaps and improve quality for doctors, patients and others in the health care system.
Each of the four contractors offered a somewhat different approach in its implementation, but none seemed to emerge a clear winner in the competition to design an architecture for the national network.
Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services who sponsored the demonstration and financed development of the prototypes have said the NHIN will be a network of networks. That means no single architecture need prevail, as long as the networks are interoperable.
The demonstrations for the American Health Information Community (AHIC) called for each team to demonstrate its solution to one of two use cases, or scenarios, that posed technical problems.
One scenario called for an elderly woman on an extended visit to her daughter in a distant city to summon her e-health records and make them available to a new set of doctors. The other called for distribution of laboratory test results to doctors in different circumstances.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT also had laid out a third use case involving biosurveillance for infectious diseases. Although the contractors did not demonstrate their solutions for that situation today, Dr. John Loonsk of ONCHIT said the teams had met the contract requirements for that use case as well.
“It’s heartening to see that you’ve come this far,” said one AHIC member, Lillee Gelinas, a vice president of VHA Inc., a hospital purchasing and operations alliance.
The teams differed in how many services were offered centrally in their networks and how and where the data was stored, among other distinctions.
They are led by four companies with extensive experience in systems integration for government customers. The prime contractors are Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp., IBM and Northrop Grumman.
More NHIN demonstrations are scheduled for Jan. 25 in Washington, D.C., at an ONCHIT-sponsored NHIN Forum open to the public.
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.
