LAS VEGAS – For the IT team at EKCITA HIE, it was an exhilarating end to an impromptu challenge – the challenge posed by the country’s top champion for interoperable healthcare, no less.
EKCITA HIE jumped at an invitation to participate at HIMSS12 as one of three partners in the Cal eConnect statewide demo on the “blue carpet” – the highly prized area showing leading innovation in interoperability for secure exchange of patient data.
LAS VEGAS – For the IT team at EKCITA HIE, it was an exhilarating end to an impromptu challenge – the challenge posed by the country’s top champion for interoperable healthcare, no less.
EKCITA HIE jumped at an invitation to participate at HIMSS12 as one of three partners in the Cal eConnect statewide demo on the “blue carpet” – the highly prized area showing leading innovation in interoperability for secure exchange of patient data.
EKCITA not only created the use case for the demo – building on work it had done two years earlier at HIMSS 2010 – but won a surprise challenge tossed out near the end of the weeklong conference by the national coordinator of health information technology himself – Farzad Mostashari, MD. Surprising his entire HHS team, Mostashari ran down to the floor unexpectedly and shouted out the challenge to all takers – could anyone there securely exchange patient data through the Direct ONC connection with another healthcare entity they had never before met or worked with?
“In less than an hour?” Mostashari asked. “I’ll be back in an hour!”
Alex Horowitz, CTO of EKCITA, had several offers from entities around the country, and worked with Dave Juntgen from Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE) in Indiana – dealing with strict firewall security protocols, slow Internet connections in the building, and double encryption issues. In between attempts at sending and receiving, Horowitz answered myriad questions from Mostashari and Doug Fridsma, MD, director of ONC’s standards and interoperability, who later debriefed him on the major stumbling blocks in anticipation of futher work ONC will do.
EKCITA and MIE were the first entrants to succeed in exhanging demo patient data – only one other group was able to exchange, hours after EKCITA completed the challenge. Mostashari and Fridsma have invited EKCITA and MIE for an in-person further demo later in the year.
EKCITA HIE is the Health Information Exchange (HIE) in California’s Central Valley that was originated from a series of AHRQ grants in 2004. It is now expanding into Stanislaus and Fresno counties aided by a Cal eConnect grant.
EKCITA uses a hybrid architecture delivered by Browsersoft of Kansas, which keeps delineated databases for each exchange partner within its central repository, querying each database to create the full CCD each time patient data is accessed. EKCITA is known for its public health orientation given its additional de-identified database and the strength of its management team, led by founder and CEO Kiki Nocella.
“I’m so proud of the EKCITA team,” Nocella said. “Our success has come from keeping our heads down, doing the work, and nurturing a passion that makes quitting never an option.”
