The California Regional Health Information Organization (CalRHIO) has selected the team of Medicity and Perot Systems to build a statewide health information exchange service.
The nonprofit organization’s leaders announced that the contractor team’s first step will be to help CalRHIO find $300 million in private financing for the start-up of the exchange, including a backbone network, marketing and CalRHIO's operations.
The exchange will operate as a utility, offering services to health care providers, patients, government agencies and RHIOs in California. The network can be used for local data exchanges or to link existing exchanges with one another.
User fees will support the exchange. No details about the fees have been made public,. However, CalRHIO officials said the savings expected as a result of having better information to care for patients will be many times greater than the cost of the exchange’s services.
Medicity, headquartered in Salt Lake City, specializes in Web-based integration of health records. Perot Systems, based in Plano, Texas, is an information technology services company that does considerable business with the government.
Dr. Molly Coye, one of CalRHIO’s founders, said in a statement that the Medicity/Perot team offered not only proven technology, but also an innovative approach to financing the project, an approach that appears able to sustain the exchange in the long term.
CalRHIO issued its request for proposals in December 2006. The following month, it announced that eight companies were in the running for the contract. Besides Medicity, they were Accenture; Covisint; Computer Sciences Corp.; IBM, partnering with Axolotl; McKesson; Sun Microsystems; and Wellogic.
The announcement of the contract award stressed the flexibility of the future exchange, including its expected ability to connect a variety of existing e-health records systems and other health IT applications. It also emphasized that the information would be transmitted securely.
“It is imperative that we get a technology solution up and running as soon as possible to accommodate the needs of California doctors, hospitals and patients,” Dr. Donald Holmquest, CalRHIO’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “Every day in California, 50,000 or more patients are experiencing suboptimal care solely because important medical information is missing from their records.”
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.
