Feds plan more health IT services, fewer networks June 8, 2009

* By Paul McCloskey
* Jun 05, 2009

The federal health information technology community plans a significant upgrade to its NHIN Connect software in the coming year, including adding tools to manage patient identification and health documents via the Nationwide Health Information Network.

New enterprise services planned for Connect, a software gateway that gives federal health agencies access to the NHIN, include a master index for managing patient identities, policy engine to handle health records authorizations and registry to organize patient health documents.

In April the Federal Health Architecture released an open-source version of the Connect gateway software that included core NHIN services, including patient look-up and record retrieval.

Vish Sankaran, FHA program director, said the new services would help move the project a step closer to becoming a tool that would “make a real impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.” He spoke at a panel discussion on federal heath information sharing at the Government Health IT conference yesterday.

“We now live in a world where you can get information at your fingertips on virtually every topic known to mankind,” he said. “Yet the most important area of all — our health — can’t easily get info when we need it. It’s time to change this once and for all; federal agencies are committed to moving this forward.”

In addition to adding enterprise services to Connect, Sankaran said the FHA community would look for ways to consolidate individual federal health networks and the number of data interfaces between federal and state health program offices.

“There are a lot of health IT investments in the federal government today,” he said. “We are not expecting to rip and replace — we’re going to have to create bridges so we don’t have to reinvest or reinvent.”

State and federal health data links will also be canvassed for consolidation. “We need to look into some ways to streamline data feeds from the state agencies to the federal agencies,” he said. “That can really save money and improve service to the citizens.”

Rear Adm. Theresa Cullen, chief information officer of the Indian Health Service, said participating in the FHA project was essential to her far-flung but budget-strapped agency.

“We’re in 35 states and do not want be in a situation to have to write 100 different interfaces,” she said. “Our participation in the NHIN is driven by a huge business need and recognition we are leveraging the amazing advances that other federal partners are bringing to the table.”

But although cost is a catalyst, better healthcare coordination will be the greater NHIN payoff, she told the conference audience. “We believe there is unprecedented opportunity for our country [to receive] additional intelligence from NHIN for improved situational awareness, the ability to recognize epidemics, and also to track clinical quality measures based on regional differences.”

Henry Chao, chief technology officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, admonished agency policy-makers and line-of-business managers for failing to collaborate energetically on health information initiatives.
“Collaboration requires the business side to get invigorated,” he said. “The policy-makers have to get together and be in the same room and same meetings in the same planning sessions” as the health IT planners.

“Otherwise, [health IT innovation] just kind of sits there or moves along not at the pace our leaders want us to have to make things happen.”

About the Author

Paul McCloskey is editor-in-chief of Government Health IT magazine.