Four contractor teams on Tuesday demonstrated their prototypes for the Nationwide Health Information Network to the American Health Information Community, Government Health IT reports.
The four different systems were developed by Accenture, Computer Sciences, IBM and Northrop Grumman. Each system will bridge data gaps and improve quality for physicians, patients and other health providers. HHS officials said the NHIN will be a collaborative system of interoperable networks, Government Health IT reports.
Each system was required to demonstrate a solution for one scenario involving an elderly woman who needed to obtain her electronic health record and make it available to new physicians in a distant city. The other scenario required laboratory test results to be distributed to physicians in different circumstances.
A third scenario, involving biosurveillance for infectious diseases, was developed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, although the vendors did not demonstrate their solution for the case on Wednesday. Dr. John Loonsk of ONCHIT said the contractors also met the contract requirements for the third scenario (Ferris, Government Health IT, 1/24).
Accenture's NHIN model stores patient data regionally in a central location to compare demographic trends.
Computer Sciences' prototype, called Indivo and partly developed at Children's Hospital Boston, allows patients to control their complete EHRs, according to the hospital.
IBM's prototype allows patients and local providers to control the patient data, and it uses open standards, so health providers can choose hardware and software providers for their EHR network, according to Ginny Wagner, NHIN coordinator for IBM (Gross, IDG New Service/InfoWorld, 1/23). The IBM system is being tested with seven hospitals and 24 physicians in New York, North Carolina and Virginia (Wolf, Poughkeepsie Journal, 1/24).
All four systems consist of an electronic patient index, integration of seven proprietary EHR software systems, an electronic prescribing network and a personal health record management system in order to address patient privacy issues.
The four teams, which were initiated through an $18.6 million grant from HHS, on Thursday and Friday will demonstrate their prototypes to industry representatives and the public in Washington, D.C. (Poughkeepsie Journal, 1/24).