Government updates national health network plans, focuses on implementation concerns
By
Deni Connor
,
NetworkWorld.com
, 02/20/2006
- Share/Email
- Tweet This
- Print
SAN DIEGO - Amid privacy, security and technological concerns, healthcare IT professionals got a progress report on the status
of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) which seeks to improve patient care and reduce medical errors in implementing
electronic health records systems.
At the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) show in San Diego, as many as 22,700 IT managers and CIOs
listened as a number of individuals including Dr. David Brailer, national coordinator for Health Information Technology for
the Department of Health and Human Services, described their visions of such a network, the current barriers to adoption and
the progress toward the NHIN.
In April 2004, President George Bush charged the IT industry to build a system that would provide every citizen of the United
States with an electronic health record (EHR) that could be accessed from any location by 2014. He appointed Dr. Brailer to
coordinate this effort and establish the NHIN.
This last December, Brailer's office awarded $18.6 million in contracts to four consortia led by IBM, Computer Science Corporation,
Accenture and Northrop Grumman to develop prototype architectures for the NHIN. Each consortium consists of technology developers
and hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and physicians who must prove that EHRs can be exchanged seamlessly among entities.
The consortia are using existing collectives of hospitals called regional health information organizations (RHIOs) to build
these data interchange networks.
“These prototypes are the key to information portability for American consumers and are a major step in our national effort
to modernize health care delivery,” says Dr. Brailer, in a statement.
Brailer envisions the architecture of the NHIN to be such that existing RHIOs can connect to it; other organizations and physician
offices that are not part of a RHIO will be able to connect too.
“I did not start out by believing the national solution will be a network of regional networks,” says Brailer in his keynote
speech at HIMSS. “Our goal with the national health information network is to allow those who do not want to participate in
RHIOs to not have to do it."
Two networks – those proposed by Northrop Grumman and CSC -- consist of distributed peer-to-peer networks, which use a federated
identity model that lets different organizations share identity data with trusted network access and authentication. Patient
information would be identified by unique metadata tags and be exchanged among organizations using standard protocols.
Foremost in IT professionals' minds in building out these networks is how physicians will be reimbursed for adopting information
technology. Outside of that are concerns that adopting an EHR and nationwide health network will focus attention on a number
of technological issues. Among those concerns are a lack of recognized standards, the security and privacy of patient health
information and the trusted access and authentication of clinicians to EHR information.
Comment