health information exchanges (HIEs)

See the following -

What If EMRs Worked Like Wikipedia?

Nick Dawson | The Health Care Blog | February 5, 2014

I’ve been thinking about EMRs, electronic medical records, lately. It’s a subject, despite some professional experience, I don’t feel particularly close to...And, as a patient I see them largely as an opaque blob of data about me with a placating window in the form of a portal.

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AHRQ Releases Draft Guide for Registry Interoperability: Does Public Health Have a Role?

On January 11, 2019, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a draft Addendum to the Third Edition of Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide called Tool and Technologies for Registry Interoperability. AHRQ has long written about registries - largely from a research standpoint - and I have been following this from afar for some time. This new guide is focused on helping those who both create and use registries understand the issue surrounding leveraging external data to improve registry completeness, accuracy, and usefulness. This report covers lots of ground and does a good job of summarizing important subtopics. Each chapter is overflowing with footnotes and sources.

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

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | January 8, 2015

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?...

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

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | January 7, 2015

The previous installment of this article talked about the survivability of HIEs, drawing on a report released under ONC auspices. This installment delves into some other interesting aspects of information exchange...

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ASTHO Releases Two New Reports On IIS

In March 2023 the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO) released two environmental scans related to public health data and systems funded by a grant from ONC. The first report, Immunization Information Systems, and Health Information Exchanges: An Environmental Scan of Factors Influencing Data Sharing and Opportunities to Advance Population Health, provides a review of the state of both IIS and HIEs – as well as their points of intersection and support – especially as they were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. ASTHO used a mixture of secondary source review (including our white paper on this topic from nearly ten years ago) and current interviews and focus groups to inform us about this complex and fluid topic.

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Cal INDEX and Inland Empire HIE Will Merge to Form California's Largest Health Information Exchange

Press Release | Cal INDEX | January 17, 2017

The California Integrated Data Exchange (Cal INDEX) and Inland Empire Health Information Exchange (IEHIE) today announced a planned merger that will create one of the nation's most comprehensive nonprofit health information exchanges (HIEs). Claudia Williams, former White House technology senior advisor, will lead the new organization as CEO, effective February 1, 2017. The merger, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2017 and will operate as a tax-exempt public benefit corporation under a new name...

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careMESH Raises $5M in Seed Funding to Scale Integration of its Healthcare Communications Platform

Press Release | careMESH | June 16, 2020

careMESH today announced that it has closed an initial $5M seed round led by Assurance Capital and Pavey Family Investments, with participation by other early-stage investor funds and individuals. The funding will be used to scale adoption of its first-of-a-kind communications platform, which brings a National Provider Directory, patient event notifications, secure communications, and transition of care workflows into a single service for hospitals, health systems and other healthcare delivery organizations

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Closing the Referral Problem in Distributed Care Networks

There have been any number of people and companies working tirelessly to solve healthcare's interoperability challenges. Hospitals, EHR software companies, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Federal and State governments, payers, and others have developed, tested, and implemented many in-house or vendor-built solutions to try to clear this hurdle. Recently, consumer technology vendors and patient-centered innovation programs have begun to make significant strides on directly expanding patients access to their own records. This is great news for patients, but when I am a patient, I also want my doctors and other caregivers to be able to communicate about me when needed. So, making me responsible for stewarding pieces of my record between them doesn't solve the challenge. Especially if I have received care in three or four different places or worse yet, become incapacitated.

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CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid

After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.

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CommonWell: Healthcare Interoperability Or Bust

Mark Braunstein | Information Week | January 8, 2015

Peter Bernhardt of CommonWell Health Alliance, a group of clinical and health IT organizations, talks about its goal of better data exchange and application integration...

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DeSalvo Unveils ONC Plans For Health IT Beyond HITECH Act

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | June 2, 2014

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is preparing itself for the next era of health IT adoption, one that will not rely primarily on financial incentives for healthcare providers...

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Despite $600 Million From Stimulus, Jury Out On Health Information Exchanges

Bruce Japsen | Forbes.com | December 2, 2014

Despite $600 million in federal dollars allocated to creating health information exchanges designed to facilitate sharing of patient medical information, more work needs to be done to show whether they are living up to their promise, a new RAND Corp. study indicates...

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DirectTrust Delivers Interoperable Messaging To Healthcare

Alison Diana | Information Week | November 24, 2014

The nonprofit industry alliance DirectTrust hopes its voluntary accreditation and audit program, digital certificates, and relationship with the federal government will encourage more health information service providers (HISPs) to join its expanding program...

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Do Epic And Interoperability Interface? Depends On Whom You Ask

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | December 12, 2014

The nation’s largest electronic medical record vendor has an image problem. Verona, Wis.-based Epic has come under fire this year over its lack of interoperability, spurring the company, once well known for its mum relationship with the press, to speak up...

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Federal ‘Biosurveillance’ Plan Seeking Direct Access To Americans’ Private Medical Records

Barbara Hollingsworth | CNSNews.com | May 20, 2014

The federal government is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security, according to Twila Brase, a public health nurse and co-founder of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom.  

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