Health Information Exchanges

FHA and its partners are working together to deliver shared solutions that address the real-world business priorities of federal agencies to securely exchange health data electronically with healthcare providers and other organizations around the country.

In late 2008, federal agencies participating in FHA successfully demonstrated the ability to send information to each other as well as to regional hospital networks throughout the country. The federal agencies will connect their systems to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) in order to communicate. This will be achieved through an FHA product called CONNECT, which lets agencies connect their healthcare technology systems securely into NHIN.

Through CONNECT, FHA and the federal partners will:

1. Establish a Federal Health IT Consortium
2. Participate in the NHIN trial implementations
3. Architect a Federal NHIN Health Information Exchange (NHIE) Gateway solution
4. Establish a Federal NHIE (“NHIE-Fed”)

Strategy One: Establish a Federal Health IT Consortium
The CONNECT Consortium is composed of federal agencies that use health information in the delivery of services. This consortium is composed of two major groups: the business owner/subject matter experts group and the technical/program management experts group. The first group provides requirements/configuration control guidance, while the second group provides architecture and program management guidance and insures completion of deliverables including an operational NHIN Gateway.   

Strategy Two: Participate in the NHIN Trial Implementations
The CONNECT Consortium, a collaborative partnership, participates in the NHIN trial implementations to achieve consensus among the federal partners and to present a single unified face to the NHIN Cooperative on behalf of the federal agencies.

The NHIN trials  began on October 19, 2007. Participants include federal agencies and health information exchanges from the private sector. Through this public-private trial, FHA expects to achieve significant gains in identifying best practices and technology gaps for creating a fully operational NHIN Health Information Exchange.

Strategy Three: Architect a Federal NHIE Gateway Solution
The CONNECT Consortium’s technical/program management team is creating a NHIN Gateway solution that employs existing health interoperability engineering artifacts. This team participates in the technical work groups of the NHIN Cooperative to represent federal needs in defining the services required to achieve interoperable exchange of health information. By constructing a shared development, non-shared deployment strategy, the technical/program management team will oversee the specification of a reference architecture, reference implementation and reference deployment package for the NHIE gateway solution. At the end of the first year, agencies will receive the released CONNECT Gateway solution. It will be a deployable package that includes the CONNECT software and an adapter software development kit.

Strategy Four: Establish a Federal NHIE
Establishing an operational NHIN requires that the CONNECT Consortium continues to administer a shared governance structure for setting priorities and configuration controls over the federal CONNECT Gateway solution. The individual agencies will be responsible for rolling out agency-specific adapters and deploying, operating and maintaining the CONNECT Gateway within their security domains. This approach will be used in the short term during the NHIN trials. As NHIN matures and becomes fully operational, agencies will revisit the model of a federal NHIE and make adjustments based on lessons learned and needs.