Maine paves the HIE path

A session during the iHT2 Health IT Summit offered details on the successful health information exchange (HIE) effort in Maine, which includes every hospital in the state, links 400 practices and facilitates 13 million messages. About 90 percent of the state's residents have data in the exchange, according to Devore Culver, executive director and CEO of HealthInfoNet, Maine’s HIE.

“The post office function of an HIE is not a sustainable model,” Culver said. “If you are thinking about HIEs like a post office, you’re probably in the wrong business. It’s all about the data." 

Critical factors to achieving success include standardizing data to remove variability from data sources, and harnessing data for meaningful analytics. HealthInfoNet uses a data warehouse that stores and analyzes data in real time, and currently is tapping the data to mine four predictors for key events, including risk of admission of the emergency room, probability of admission in six months, the most expensive asset in six months and who will return in 30 days, Culver said.

“One lesson we’ve learned that is that you can kill your user with too much data. We literally had to back off the concept of completeness, as it had no value,” said Culver. “The natural inclination is to dump everything on a user, but you shut people off.”

Maine appears to be leading the HIE pack. Will other states follow suit?

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor