Electronic Health Records

The 2010 Vision for Health Information Exchange

May 26, 2010

Federal Computer Week - When it comes to understanding the value of technology in transforming healthcare in the U.S., one example that stood out in 2009 was the National Health Information Network (NHIN), which has garnered early success as a government health information exchange.

NHIN’s goal is three-fold: to provide better patient care via the online exchange of information, reduce costs and improve access to care. With $2.1 trillion spent on healthcare and costs rising each year, there’s an enormous need find ways to use technology to assist in controlling the cost of healthcare. Officials estimate costs will rise to $35,000 per year for a family of four in 2015, up from $5,800 in 1990.

Since 2007, the Federal Health Architecture has worked to help implement information exchange and ensure the operational infrastructure is in place to leverage the NHIN. In 2010, FHA plans to release version 3.4 of its base software, called Connect, which will incorporate impending 2011 requirements for meaningful use.

“Early success of the FHA’s NHIN has led to a fast growing community interested in advancing the overall goal of building a healthy ecosystem of buyers and sellers who want to advance the concept of HIEs,” said Vish Sankaran, FHA’s program director in an interview with 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media contributing editor, Barbara DePompa.

Sankaran’s vision for NHIN in the coming year includes a new primary goal, “to ensure the federal government is a stakeholder, not the sole owner of the NHIN,” he said.

To help achieve this goal, a work group was recently formed to make NHIN available to the broadest possible audience of stakeholders.

“We are working to expand the usefulness of NHIN to insurance payers, pharmacies, state governments and other entities, such as device manufacturers to help build the NHIN into a true ecosystem enabling national information liquidity,” he explained.

FHA is also gathering requests from other cross agency initiatives that want to learn more from FHA on how to accomplish such a healthy environment for cooperation. Also in 2010, FHA will make sure the features of the virtual lifetime electronic record initiative announced by the President last Spring are incorporated into the NHIN. And another initiative includes integration of the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), he said.

Sankaran hopes to replicate NHIN’s success in multiple domains in coming years. Where there now is an ecosystem of companies providing services to government institutions such as Medicaid, Medicare and even the DoD, via its Data Exchange program, FHA’s Connect program helps support all of these activities, he explained. FHA has made its Connect software available for download, spurring several state and local governments to join the collective, including the New York State Department of Health, the Washington state Department of Health and MedVirginia, among others. More than $600 million in grants are currently available to state and local governments, and as of December, approximately 15 more organizations were investigating tying to the NHIN.

Meanwhile, Sankaran is hoping industry suppliers will step up to implement solutions for the NHIN.

“Once data is freed for information exchange, more edge solutions, much like the one unveiled by Cisco, which has incorporated Connect into a single device, will be made available,” he said.

In mid-2009 there were 13 suppliers in the Connect community. By November, that number jumped 50 and more than 1,200 attendees attended the first Connect software developer ‘code-a-thon’ last fall. At code-a-thons, open source developers from outside government have started contributing code to Connect, Sankaran said. As solutions are developed for NHIN users, FHA will post industry supplier names on its Connect web site to ensure users can learn more about services as they become available. Agency personnel and other interested parties should also note more demonstrations of Connect and NHIN are planned for the HIMMS 2010 conference in March.