Monday, September 13, 2010

A Health Information Exchange Gap Analysis

At last week's New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN) Board meeting, its multi-stakeholder non-profit Board discussed the healthcare information exchange capabilities required to support meaningful use stage 1 for all stakeholders in the Commonwealth.

NEHEN based the gap analysis on the work of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute (MeHI) Ad Hoc HIE Workgroup which has made functional recommendations as part of the ONC State HIE process. The vision that the Ad Hoc Workgroup outlined over the Summer was:

Our 2011 vision is to provide the routing, directories, security, public key infrastructure, quality registries, and public health repositories necessary for every provider in the Commonwealth to achieve meaningful use stage 1, improving healthcare quality, safety and efficiency.

Our 2013 vision is to provide the master patient index, record locator, all payer database, event notification, and data exchange tools necessary to achieve meaningful use stage 2, improving care coordination and population health in the Commonwealth.

Our 2015 vision is To provide the surveillance, decision support, clinical research, and privacy protection tools necessary to achieve meaningful use stage 3, creating the foundation for accountable care organizations and supporting healthcare reform in the Commonwealth.

To achieve the goal of connecting every provider to meaningful use transactions, new HIE capabilities will be procured to fill gaps in functionality and coverage.

The attached presentation illustrates how NEHEN's current capabilities would be expand to fill the gaps in order to achieve the HIE vision for the Commonwealth. It's likely many vendors and existing local HIE activities will all collaborate to form a network of networks in the Commonwealth. The NEHEN analysis illustrates the kind of in the trenches work that will need to be done to achieve statewide meaningful use.

No comments: