Health Information Exchange (HIE)

The catalog of standards and implementation specs for data exchange is evolving away from a static PDF and toward an interactive, wiki-style platform.

Cerner, athenahealth and other members of the EHR interoperability organization say members can soon self-enroll in the CommonWell network via their portals.

The framework will make interoperability work happening today widespread as more and more EHR vendors, HIEs and providers join the network, according to an Epic executive.

This past Friday, Karen DeSalvo, MD, officially stepped down as National Coordinator, passing the baton to her second-in-command, Vindell Washington, MD. The former principal deputy national coordinator has been with ONC since January 2016.

DeSalvo made her way from New Orleans to Washington and while serving as National Coordinator, she realigned ONC and delivered visionary strategic plans for interoperability and health IT, before President Obama nominated her to a key HHS post.

In conjunction with the Keystone Health Information Exchange, Geisinger Health System sends clinicians push HL7 ORU messages in a population health management program to identify at-risk patients and reduce readmissions.

Using real-time data from its provider customers, athenahealth has identified more than 5,000 Florida patients currently at-risk of becoming infected by the Zika virus, the company announced today.

With the number of health information exchanges declining since 2012, and EHR makers creating their own exchanges, the latter might just be a more effective way to share patient data. 

The Consumer Health Data Aggregator and Provider User Experience challenges focus on easing access to information for patients and clinicians, using open APIs and the FHIR interoperability standard.  

Carefluence OpenAPI proved to be compliant with Office of the National Coordinator criteria by using the FHIR standard. The application programming interface also can used with EHRs for open access.