The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has awarded six more contracts totaling about $600,000 to health systems and health information exchanges to participate in the development of the Nationwide Health Information Network, Government Health IT reports.
Winners of the new contracts, or cooperative agreements, are:
- Cleveland Clinic, a medical system with 5.3 million patients;
- HealthBridge of Cincinnati, a health information exchange that connects providers across a tri-state area;
- HealthLINC/Bloomington Hospital, an e-health collaborative that serves a 10-county area in South-Central Indiana;
- Kaiser Permanente, the country's largest private integrated health care delivery organization;
- The Community Health Information Collaborative, a partnership among providers in a rural, 18-county region of Minnesota; and
- Wright State University/HealthLink regional health information organization, a health information exchange in West-Central Ohio.
On Sept. 28, the demonstration project is scheduled to demonstrate live exchanges of health records. The group will not use actual health records because of security concerns, but the remainder of this year will be devoted to preparing for the exchange of actual health records in 2009 (Ferris,
Government Health IT, 5/1).