Coalition defines EHR to HIE data sharing standards

A band of U.S. states and technology vendors came together to create technical specifications that enable EHRs to feed into HIEs.

The specifications, agreed upon Tuesday, “leverage existing HL7 standards, technical frameworks from IHE International, and HIE implementations,” the group explained in a prepared statement.

Two use cases concern “the detailed data and metadata specification for a compliant Continuity of Care Document,” the working group noted, explaining that the first, Statewide Send and Receive Patient Record Exchange, enables health records to be encrypted, then sent over the Internet, whereas the second use case, Statewide Patient Data Inquiry Service, is what allows clinicians to query an HIE for patient data. These specs, the working group added, sync with Beacon Community guidelines for purposes of reporting to ONC.

“I am encouraged by and excited about this type of collaboration, which has the potential to advance real-world pilots, implementation and feedback on standards for health information exchange,” said Doug Fridsma, MD and PhD, director of the Office of Standards & Interoperability at the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC). “The results of this kind of initiative can help us advance health IT nationwide."

Indeed, what started within the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) soon grew to include California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon because, as NYeC executive director David Whitlinger added, “we soon realized that many other states were facing the same interoperability challenges and many of the EHR and HIE vendors were also looking for clarity from the marketplace to define their product roadmaps.”

In addition to the seven states, the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup includes eight EHR vendors: Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, e-MDs, Greenway Medical Technologies, McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, NextGen Healthcare, Sage Healthcare Division, and Siemens Healthcare, as well as three HIE services vendors participating, those being Axolotl, InterSystems, and Medicity.

This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/Z8BrX