[Med-privacy] NHIN

[peter marshall]

Government Executive
National health records network to hook up with Google, Microsoft
By Bob Brewin bbrewin@govexec.com March 27, 2008


The federal office in charge of creating a national network of 
electronic health records plans to integrate the system with the health 
care databases that Google and Microsoft launched last year, on which 
individuals can store their health records, a top official with the 
Health and Human Services Department said.

The Office of the Coordinator of Health Information Technology plans 
this year to expand its Nationwide Health Information Network to also 
include electronic health records stored in networks operated by the 
departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and the Indian Health 
Service, and integrated health care systems that span numerous 
communities, said Charles Friedman, chief operating officer for the 
health information office, which is part of HHS. Friedman spoke March 
26 at the Defense Health Care Information Technology Conference at 
Georgetown University in Washington.

The NHIN is the primary component of a project that President Bush 
kicked off in 2004 to create a network that eventually will integrate 
the electronic health records of every American. Bush set 2014 as the 
deadline to have the majority of the public's electronic health records 
available to any doctor's office, hospital or clinic hooked up to the 
network. The original architecture for the national network will be 
built around four multistate Regional Health Information Organizations 
that will share their patients' medical data. HHS set up the four RHIOs 
in 2005 when it awarded contracts to Accenture, Computer Sciences 
Corp., IBM and Northrop Grumman.

Friedman provided few details on how the office would incorporate 
personal health records from Google Health and other organizations 
developing similar applications, such as Microsoft's HealthVault, which 
it launched in October. By the end of this year, HHS will have 
demonstrated the exchange of different kinds of health information 
through the network.

Last month, Google launched a pilot project with the Cleveland Clinic 
to provide patients the results of their doctor visits, prescriptions, 
tests and procedures through Google's secure Web authentication proxy 
service.

Friedman did not say how his office will incorporate multicommunity 
integrated health care delivery systems, but plans to tie these systems 
into the NHIN indicate that the HHS office wants to expand the network 
from the state to the local level, with the network hooking up cities 
and towns within a state, according to an executive of a health IT 
vendor at the conference who declined to be identified.

Federal interfaces to the health network will be through an entity 
called NHIN Connect, Friedman said. NHIN Connect will be based on the 
National Health Information Exchange Gateway, which Harris Corp. will 
develop under a contract HHS awarded last week, said Lt. Col. Hon Pak, 
director of the advanced information technology group of the Army's 
Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center at Fort Detrick, 
Md.

Pak, who serves as the Defense representative on NHIN Connect, said the 
network will use software developed by Defense and VA for the 
Bidirectional Health Information Exchange, which clinicians in both 
departments use to share electronic patient information, and software 
developed by the National Cancer Institute for its Cancer Biomedical 
Informatics Grid. The NHIN Connect gateway integrates health care IT 
information from several federal agencies into the NHIN. This includes 
VA, Defense and the Indian Health Service as well as the Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and 
Medicaid Services, Pak said. NHIN Connect is in an early development 
stage; the first multiagency planning meeting was held yesterday, he 
added.

The NHIN gateway will save the government significant money by 
correlating simple demographic information with federal programs, such 
as determining who is alive and who has died, said Dr. Stanley Saiki 
Jr., director of the Pacific Telehealth and Technology Group, a joint 
Defense and VA research organization funded by the Army's Telemedicine 
and Advanced Technology Research Center.

States and the federal government "really can't even keep close track 
of who dies so that their Social Security and other benefits can be 
terminated," Saiki said. "This savings alone could go a long way to 
finance important data systems. Magnify this by the potential increased 
efficiency in the delivery of health care and magnify this again with 
universal coverage and [the gateway and NHIN Connect] is a big deal."

(C) 2007 BY NATIONAL JOURNAL GROUP, INC.