Vendors and states unite! Data-sharing specs made available

A group of states and vendors has issued a set of technical specifications to standardize connections between healthcare providers, health information exchanges (HIEs) and other data-sharing partners.

The objective of the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup is to define a single set of standardized connections to increase the adoption of EHRs and HIE services.

Originally formed by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), the workgroup is comprised of its federally designated counterparts in seven states (California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Oregon) representing approximately 30 percent of the country's population. The eight EHR vendor members are Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, e-MDs, Greenway Medical Technologies, McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, NextGen Healthcare, Sage Healthcare Division and Siemens Healthcare.

In addition, there are three HIE services vendors participating: Axolotl, InterSystems and Medicity.

The first set of specifications focuses on two use cases and the data and metadata specification for a compliant continuity-of-care document. The first use case, Statewide Send and Receive Patient Record Exchange, describes how encrypted health information can be transmitted over the internet. The second, the Statewide Patient Data Inquiry Service Use Case, describes the clinician's ability to query an HIE for relevant data on a specific patient.

The specifications are available for the public here.

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