The potential advantages offered by health information exchanges (HIEs) are well-known. Theyll be vital spokes of the proposed Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) architecture initiative, streamlining patient care and records and providing accurate, nearly immediate test results to practitioners anywhere. The potential is promising, but the reality is no Field of Dreams scenario: If you build an HIE, subscribers will not necessarily come.

Electronic health information exchanges will do far more than just streamline patient care, increase medical record accuracy and availability and expedite billing.

The roots of the issues with health information exchanges namely, trust and expectations are important to highlight now.

ATLANTAMeaningful usea concept introduced one year agoappears to be spurring an increase in health IT spending along with a brightening economy, according to the 21 annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) leadership survey, released today during the societys conference.

ATLANTAWhether enough is being done to protect the rights of patient data, while simultaneously allowing for health information to be exchanged amongst care providers under the proposed meaningful use definitions, became an area of contention during today's Meaningful Use Town Hall discussion during the CIO Forum, co-hosted by CHIME and HIMSS, at the HIMSS10 conference.

Hartford Hospital is collaborating with NextGate in a health information exchange implementation and a separate workflow integration project using NextGate's MatchMetrix indexing software to identify a patient across various encounters and locations within and beyond the Connecticut-based Hartford Healthcare system.

Mary Lanning Memorial Hospital, in Hastings, Neb., has joined the Nebraska Health Information Initiative, a nonprofit statewide health information exchange (HIE) designed to share clinical and administrative data among providers using Axolotls Elysium Exchange platform.

Our CMIO Compensation Survey 2010 showed that health information exchange technology is rated as very important by 43 percent, moderately important by 20 percent and important by 27 percent of respondents. With the availability of federal stimulus funds and the call for meaningful use and exchange of information, its no surprise that HIE is getting a lot of attention. But getting from concept to deployment/subscription can be hard road to travel.