Health Information Exchanges Making Progress
September 15, 2012
It looks like the healthcare field may finally be entering the twenty-first century. Agilex informs us that “Maine’s HealthInfoNet Supports CDC Program to Demonstrate the Preventive Care Value of Health Information Exchanges.” We believe the Health Info Exchange (HIE) idea is a good analytics sector, and look forward to following its growth.
The CDC program referred to in the title is long-windedly called “Demonstrating the Preventive Care Value of Health Information Exchanges”, and is being led by Agilex. In 2009, Maine was one of the first states to launch an HIE, a system that is maintained by HealthInfoNet. Since they have had time to work out any kinks, and because almost 80 percent of Maine residents have at least one record in the system, that state is the first to participate in the program.
The press release states:
“HealthInfoNet is using an open-source application called popHealth to de-identify, aggregate and securely transmit clinical quality measures to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC). Sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), popHealth was developed to automate reporting of meaningful use measures from a provider’s electronic health record system while ensuring de-identification of the transmitted data. The application was selected for this program due to its ability to create population-level data that has been de-identified at both the patient and provider level. This population-level data can be used to inform statewide public health and heart disease prevention strategies.”
It sounds like popHealth is a valuable resource. Another important piece of the puzzle is the open source CONNECT platform, that allows HIE’s to share data externally, yet securely, via the Nationwide Health Information Network. See the article for more details.
Headquartered close to DC in Chantilly, Virginia, Agilex serves clients in federal, state, and local governments as well as corporations. They supply mission and technology consulting, software and solution development, and system integration services. In a nod to the company’s commitment to quality, their name combines “agility” with “expertise”. Agilex was founded in 2007.
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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