2012: Year of HIE implementation and collaboration?

Beth Walsh, Editor, CMIO

This year, at its annual conference, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) includes a day-long symposium on health information exchange (HIE) entitled, “HIE: The Year of Implementation, Collaboration & Beyond,” a title that echoes the declaration Farzad Mostashari, MD, national coordinator for Health IT, made recently: 2012 is the year that health IT “truly comes of age.”

Aside from the individual sessions of the HIE symposium, HIMSS12 offers numerous other HIE-related educational sessions. These offerings indicate how far we’ve come with HIE—best practices exist, organizations have been working on HIE long enough to share lessons learned and researchers can mine the existing data to advance HIE efforts. Read on for CMIO’s top picks.

Meanwhile, writing on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s blog, HealthITBuzz, Mostashari stated that the foundation built with Stage 1 meaningful use, backed with increased HIE requirements in Stage 2, will help HIE soar in 2012. The Direct Project provides a standardized way to send encrypted health information, enabling providers to meet Stage 1 meaningful use exchange requirements, he wrote. “Standards development is now focusing on the Nationwide Health Information Network… As the business value for exchange increases, our standards efforts will bear fruit, reducing the cost and complexity of implementing basic exchange functions like sending a care summary or receiving lab results. With increased value and lowered cost, information will start to flow. But, it will only move at the speed of trust.”

Trust might just be one of the hardest commodities to come by in this process. A report from data security consulting firm, Redspin, stated that a total of 385 breaches of protected health information affecting over 19 million records have been reported since the August 2009 interim final breach notification regulation was issued as a part of the HITECH Act.

The report analyzed the full data set of breaches as reported to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services since the regulation went into effect, and outlined "increasing threats and troubling trends." For example, 49,396 is the average number of patient records per breach in 2011, an 80 percent increase over 2010. There was a 97 percent increase in total records breached in 2011 compared to 2010.

Despite the breaches, many HIE players are doing their best to propel health IT forward. For example, according to a Bipartisan Policy Center report, patient-centered delivery models that rely on health IT tools require robust, interoperable HIE but that HIE is not available. To address the lack of HIE, the report made several recommendations, including that HIE operators create a business case for their product by providing more services that allow providers to meet meaningful use incentive requirements and the federal government should facilitate a healthcare community-wide dialogue to determine a common set of principles, policies and standards.

HIE represents an untapped market for job creation and market savings, according to the eHealth Initiative (eHI). A survey of HIEs found there are upwards of 100 open positions but not enough qualified job candidates.  Only three HIEs used the ONC’s job training program, so eHI recommended that the ONC work more closely with HIEs to learn what skills are necessary, increase the visibility of its workforce development program and encourage HIEs to provide training apart from education received elsewhere.

Is health IT coming of age at your facility? Share your experiences with us.

Beth Walsh
CMIO Editor
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com