HHS launches next round of NHIN development contracts
- By Nancy zz_Ferris
- Jun 06, 2007
The Department of Health and Human Services has released its long-expected request for proposals for the next phase of development of the Nationwide Health Information Network.
HHS will choose as many as 15 health information exchanges (HIEs), or regional health information organizations, as the prime contractors for the effort, according to the RFP. The exchanges must have a range of participants, such as competing health care providers, consumers, ancillary health care services, safety-net providers and public health agencies.
Proposals are due July 9, and HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology expects to announce the winners by Sept. 30. The cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts will be for a maximum of three years.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also released an RFP for HIE services in support of public health. CDC intends to award as many as 15 five-year contracts that will be coordinated with the NHIN contracts and will focus on biosurveillance.
The CDC proposals are due June 21.
The HHS NHIN contracts will result in trial implementations of real-world core functions of an HIE and also of the use cases, or situations, adopted by the American Health Information Community in the past two years. Each contractor will implement two of the use cases.
The contractors also must support e-medical records, personal health records and patient summaries. They will also have to provide security, authentication, audit logging, support for de-identification of data so it can be used in research and consumer opt-out services.
During the course of the program, the contractors and HHS will work together to establish a NHIN Cooperative to coordinate activities, work through obstacles and share lessons learned.
Contractors will be expected to conform to emerging interoperability standards to ensure that data can be exchanged among all of them. HHS informed contractors that some of the standards will not be available until late fall.
In the first round of NHIN contracts, four large systems integrators were chosen as primes. This time, such companies will have to act as subcontractors to the health information exchanges.
The first round, which produced prototype NHIN operations, ended in January.
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