HHS Awards Cooperative Agreements for additional participants in the Trial Implementations of the Nationwide Health Information Network

Cooperative agreements totaling approximately $600,000 have been awarded to six organizations to expand the participation in testing and demonstrations in the trial implementations of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

The awardees:

• HealthLINC/Bloomington Hospital
  An e-health collaborative with a multi-stakeholder board of directors consisting of representatives of multiple competing organizations, physicians, and hospitals that serves a ten county area in South Central Indiana with a population of 367,000.

• Cleveland Clinic
  A multi-specialty multi-facility academic medical system based in Cleveland, Ohio that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education for 5.3 million patients. Cleveland Clinic facilities include the main, downtown Cleveland campus, nine regional hospitals, a Florida hospital, and 13 northeast Ohio community Family Health Center outpatient clinic locations.

• Community Health Information Collaborative
  A partnership among hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, tribal health facilities, higher education, and public health departments that serve 650,000 patients in a rural, 18-county region in Minnesota.

• HealthBridge
  The largest and oldest health information exchange located in Cincinnati, Ohio, serving a tri-state region connecting 24 different hospitals and health systems, 17 local health departments, two national and multiple local laboratories, radiology and diagnostic centers, physicians offices, community health center and nursing homes, and currently covering 1.8 million patients.

• Kaiser Permanente
  The nation's largest private integrated health care delivery organization, serving over 8.7 million members in 10 states and DC.

• Wright State University
  HealthLink RHIO, West Central Ohio's regional health information exchange, represents hospitals, providers, Medicaid managed care, labs, state and local public health, public schools, social services and safety net providers, and Clark and Champaign County Health Information Exchange, and covers a population of over 500,000.

About the Cooperative Agreements:

These cooperative agreements bring an integrated delivery system and state, regional and non-geographic health information exchange entities as participants in the "network of networks" – the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

Participants will implement and test the NHIN specifications and demonstrate their connectivity to others. Through the NHIN Cooperative, awardees shall achieve, test and demonstrate technical and trust relationships and the exchange of private and secure health information among providers, patients, and other health care stakeholders with the other participants in the NHIN.

Awardees will demonstrate the "core" services to support four principal outcomes:

1. Patient lookup and information retrieval
2. Secure information routing and delivery (including, but not limited to a defined summary patient record)
3. Provision of data for population uses
4. Consumer managed access to appropriate information

This work will advance the nation toward the President's goal of most Americans having access to secure electronic health records by 2014, by creating a secure foundation for health information exchange that can follow Americans throughout their lives.