Efforts to get the next phase of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) underway are falling into place, and regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and statewide health information exchanges (HIEs) will be central players in that process, said John Loonsk, director of the Office of Interoperability and Standards at the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for health information technology.
The Gartner Group will release a report by mid-May that will provide analysis of NHIN’s prototype architectures that were demonstrated in January and spell out a group of core services identified by ONC’s American Community Information Committee as critical to the NHIN trial implementation.
That information will be incorporated into the request for proposal for the NHIN trial implementation, which Loonsk says is on track to be released in about a month. He expects seven to 10 contracts to be awarded, with RHIOs and HIEs taking the lead role on teams that bid for the project. Systems integrators helmed the four teams that responded to last year’s call for architecture prototypes.
“This is a natural progression. The vision has always been to make a network of networks, and HIEs and RHIOs are absolutely critical to accomplishing that,” Loonsk said in an interview.
“We think that HIEs are in the ideal position to develop trust relationships among the different organizations in their jurisdiction and to provide strong governance,” he added.
Loonsk also thinks that HIEs will play a key role in the recent initiative announced by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to create “value exchanges” that would use nationally recognized standards of care to assess the performance of local health care providers.
“In general, HIEs can play an important role in quality monitoring and advancing the quality of care,” Loonsk said. He noted that AHIC has identified quality as a breakthrough area and has developed a use care around it that will be demonstrated in the next trial implementation of the NHIN.
“HIEs already play an important role in that use case, in the context of advancing the idea of making quality a part of the entire care process, not just doing quality reporting,” he said.
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.
