The Santa Barbara County (Calif.) Care Data Exchange, the longest-running effort to launch a major U.S. regional health information organization, recently folded because of privacy concerns and doubts about ongoing costs, exchange officials confirmed.
Those issues had dogged the project since it began in 1998, during the first dot-com bubble, as an attempt to establish a medical data-sharing initiative linking competing health care organizations.
Technological problems with how to share information securely while allowing organizations to retain local control of their data had largely been solved, however.
“We got close but just couldn’t overcome those remaining problems,” said Robert Reid, director of medical affairs for Cottage Health System, and the former acting chairman of the exchange. “There were real legal concerns from some of the other entities [in the exchange] about the liability of having data fall into the wrong hands, despite all we had done in the way of security.”
There were also concerns about the possible expense of building the filters needed to sift sensitive information from the data stream before it was transmitted to other members of the exchange, Reid said.
The exchange had a matching grant of about $500,000 that would have paid for the project’s software vendor and the salaries for several executives needed to run it, he said, but with no income sources other than the data providers themselves, the organizations involved in the exchange didn’t see any ongoing value to their involvement.
“We are, however, keeping the 501(c)3 status of the exchange alive,” Reid said. “As people get more comfortable with the idea of these kinds of organizations, there’s the possibility we could start something up in the future.” That status prevents the exchange from having to pay some federal income taxes.
Meanwhile, the California Healthcare Foundation, which put an initial $10 million into the exchange as start-up funding, said it was considering turning the software developed for it into an open-source product that other RHIOs could use.
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.
