March 4, 2013, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM | Healthcare organizations looking to provide private healthcare information exchange (HIE) capabilities to their clinicians (and to potentially connect to regional, state, and national exchanges) have some difficult decisions ahead.

Kansas Health Information Network, the state's nonprofit, provider-led health information exchange, has successfully transmitted data from the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas to the Kansas Immunization Registry.

Clinician-to-clinician Direct messaging is now available across New York as part of the Statewide Health Information Network of New York, or SHIN-NY.

Even as surveys continue to point out the ongoing challenges to health information exchange (HIE), other developments are helping to address those barriers in small steps.

The New Hampshire Health Information Organization has selected the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative to provide executive director management services for the implementation of the statewide health information exchange (HIE).

The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange will extend free membership for all federal and state government agencies and their corresponding departments as part of its efforts to spur improvements in health information exchange.

Seventy percent of health information organizations (HIOs) in the U.S. appear to be small organizations with 10 or fewer employees, according to a survey conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).

The U.S. federal government committed to spurring health information exchange (HIE) activity across the country through the HITECH Act, offering a total of $548 million to states to facilitate local electronic exchange. Four years later, HIE activity has increased, but HIE organizations still struggle to achieve financial sustainability.