Mirth powers HIE demo using NHIN Direct standards

Mirth powered the first U.S. publicly staged multiple-organization demonstration of National Health Information Network (NHIN) direct standards and technologies at the recent Redwood MedNet HIE Conference in Santa Rosa, Calif.

The demonstration included clinical information exchange among healthcare providers across three California-based HIEs—Redwood MedNet HIE, the Western Health Information Network, of Long Beach; and Physicians Medical Group, of Santa Cruz.

The NHIN represents a set of federally architected standards for HIE, as well as tools to enable healthcare organizations to exchange health information more easily. NHIN Direct, a companion project sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), seeks to enable the transport of health information between healthcare providers, including summary care records, referrals, discharge summaries and other clinical records.

The Redwood MedNet HIE is based on Mirth open source software. The demonstration used fictitious patient records but actual system and production code, and physicians helped narrate the demonstration. It used NHIN Direct standards for provider-to-provider exchange of clinical records using an email-like approach, with SMTP as the message protocol.

The demo showed how EHRs and messages can support the care of patients who present in hospital emergency departments hundreds of miles from home and how they can be safely and rapidly treated by emergency physicians who can access their medication records, allergies and primary physician for consultation.

In addition to Mirth, technology partners supporting the initiative included Harris, MedPlus and Microsoft.

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