NaviNet was proud to be part of Health Information Technology: Creating Jobs, Reducing Costs, and Improving Quality, produced by the Massachusetts eHealth Institute and the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium, April 29 and 30, 2010. The conference, which was hosted by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, was packed with leaders from the healthcare IT industry who shared best practices, innovative initiatives and thought leadership, and mapped strategies for meeting the government's ambitious goals for Meaningful Use.
Massachusetts is home to experts in all areas of healthcare - practitioners, vendors, educators, policymakers - so it was fitting to convene this national conversation in Boston, our capital city. As Bernie Monegain, editor, HealthCare IT News, outlined in her coverage of the conference, 95% of Massachusetts citizens have health insurance, 45% of doctors have electronic health records (EHR) in place and 50% are using computerized physician order entry (CPOE) -- five times the national average.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Technology (ONC) believes that health information exchange (HIE) is critical infrastructure required to support Meaningful Use, so HIE dollars were among the first released from the HITECH Act stimulus. For more than a decade, many forms of HIE, most notably Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOS) and Community Health Information Network (CHINS) (click here to learn more) have struggled to find a viable business model. To help HIEs flourish in every state, ONC is providing not only funding, but expertise and resources to help new HIEs learn from the past.
Some state HIEs that operate today offer hope for future success. In Massachusetts, the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN) represents a stable HIE that connects payers, providers and hospitals, and Indiana's Health Information Exchange has facilitated clinical data exchange for several years. Both were discussed on a panel at the conference where the case was made that HIE infrastructure must be developed before providers and hospitals can become Meaningful Users of HIT.
The HIT industry will play an important role in supporting the government's vision. For more than a decade, NaviNet has been building and operating a network that can connect hundreds of thousands of providers across all 50 states. NaviNet has offered some HIE services to state-designated entities (SDEs) for free as a way to help them solve some of the challenges they face.
For those interested in following HIE developments closely, ONC sponsors a resource to track which states are leading the way. The State Health Information Exchange Leadership Forum is a body of state leaders from across the country tasked with identifying and sharing best healthcare IT practices. Their SHIE Toolkit includes HIE planning documents on a variety of topics from governance to technical infrastructure to finance, and is a useful resource for state officials developing HIE as well as members o the public interested in tracking the industry.
Regards,James M. BogdanSVP Payer and HIE Solutions
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