Efforts to accelerate exchange

From exchange of behavioral data to states linking their exchange to grants designed to accelerate information exchange, health information exchange (HIE) has had another busy month.

Rhode Island is leading the race, apparently. The state’s CurrentCare has exchanged behavioral health data and was recognized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for its efforts to put health IT into practice.

Meanwhile, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) announced two cooperative agreements designed to further support growth of HIE and interoperability. DirectTrust.org and the New York eHealth Collaborative will work with the office on governance.

ONC will work with the two organizations to develop policies, interoperability requirements and business processes that align with goals and reduce implementation costs, said Claudia Williams, director of the ONC’s state HIE program. “This gives us the opportunity to urge many of our partners across the nation to participate actively and robustly support the work of these two grantees.”

DirectTrust has been working with about 45 entities to create a set of policies and an accreditation program, said David C. Kibbe, MD, MBA, president and CEO. The organization’s volunteers already have worked on a security and trust framework that will serve as the basis of an accreditation program being used by several health information service providers and certification and regulatory authorities--trusted agents--who act on behalf of Direct email users.

The New York eHealth Collaborative formed its Interoperability Work Group in 2011, said David Whitlinger, executive director, and learned that many HIEs were facing similar problems, such as the ability to get the EHR and the HIE connected to each other and working together in a consistent, inexpensive way.

Those problems present a difficult proposition, Whitlinger said. To manage, they assembled EHR vendors, state HIEs and the HIE vendors who were also starting to feel that they would benefit from some standardization. The group decided that the two areas most useful to address on standards were Directed exchange and query-based exchange, also known as patient record lookup. The group established goals of developing technical specifications, testing methods and the marketing logo “such that we could get to plug and play interoperability and market to the physician community the products they could purchase that have that interoperability.”

Is your organization engaged in secure HIE? Please share your experience.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor