Dominion Medical Associates -- an independent physician practice in Richmond, Va., with more than 5,000 patients -- is participating in a medical data sharing pilot program with CenVaNet, a central Virginia health care provider network of 11 hospitals and 900 physicians, InformationWeek reports.
The program is one of the first successful integrations of federal Direct Project protocols and Nationwide Health Information Network standards, according to InformationWeek.
Background on NHIN. Direct Project
NHIN is a set of standards, specifications and services that offers a common platform for data exchange between disparate entities (Lewis, InformationWeek, 4/6).
The Direct Project is a streamlined version of NHIN and is designed to facilitate online, standards-based exchange of medical data (iHealthBeat, 2/2).
Pilot Program Details
The two health care organizations are using a platform from health information exchange network MedVirginia to share data (InformationWeek, 4/6).
Under the pilot program, Dominion scans documents relating to care management of patients with diabetes and sends electronic files to CenVaNet care managers through a physician Web portal (Goedert, Health Data Management, 4/6).
The data then are tagged and stored in a MedVirginia repository (Byers, CMIO, 4/5).