Assessment Released Of Health Information Exchanges (Part 1 Of 2)

Like my Boston-area neighbors who perennially agonize over the performance of the Red Sox, healthcare advocates spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Will the current round of exchanges work after most previous attempts failed? What results can be achieved from the 564 million dollars provided by the Office of the National Coordinator since 2009? Has the effort invested by the government and companies in the Direct project paid off, and why haven’t some providers signed up yet?

I too was consumed by such thoughts when reading a reported contracted by the ONC and released in December, “HIE Program Four Years Later: Key Findings on Grantees’ Experiences from a Six-State Review. Although I found their complicated rating system a bit arbitrary, I found several insights in the 42-page report and recommend it to readers. I won’t try to summarize it here, but will use some of the findings to illuminate–and perhaps harp on–issues that come up repeatedly in the HIE space...