HHS last week awarded $22.5 million to nine health information exchanges to begin trials for the Nationwide Health Information Network, Healthcare IT News reports.
The HIEs will participate in the NHIN Collaborative, which will test and demonstrate the exchange of private and secure health information among providers, patients and other stakeholders. The nine exchanges are:
- CareSpark in Eastern Tennessee and Southwestern Virginia;
- Delaware Health Information Network;
- Indiana University;
- Long Beach Network for Health in Long Beach, Calif., and Los Angeles;
- Lovelace Clinic Foundation in New Mexico;
- MedVirginia;
- New York eHealth Collaborative;
- North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communication Alliance; and
- West Virginia Health Information Network (Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 10/5).
The HIEs also will adopt scenarios designated as priorities by the American Health Information Community, an HHS advisory committee.
John Loonsk, director of the Office of Interoperability and Standards in HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, said the contracts are a critical step toward meeting President Bush's goal of having electronic health records for most Americans by 2014. Loonsk added that he does not expect NHIN to be fully operational when the new contracts end, but
Government Health IT reports that the network will be on its way to production by then.
Some HIEs expressed concern about becoming federal contractors if they won the grants because of the added administrative requirements of the designation. Loonsk acknowledged that the requirements narrowed the applicant pool of HIEs, but he said that ONCHIT was pleased with the quality and diversity of the selected exchanges (Ferris,
Government Health IT, 10/5).
CDC Contracts ForthcomingCDC in December is expected to announce contract awards to complement the NHIN efforts. The collaboration is intended to ensure that the NHIN exchanges can support public health agencies' community-based activities.
In September 2008, interim NHIN results will be shared with three public forums and other public demonstrations of real-time health data exchange. The NHIN health information exchanges' specifications and related testing materials will be made publicly available to encourage widespread development of the network (
Healthcare IT News, 10/5).