The SSA uses individual to decide on 2.6 million disability claims each year. As part of that process, the agency relies on doctors, hospitals and other health professionals to provide medical information about patients. By migrating from paper to electronic transmissions based on patient authorizations, SSA officials say that they can significantly reduce the time spent waiting for records to arrive.

New open-source software deployed at the SSA, combined with the use of a Virginia-based health information exchange's database, is expected to reduce the wait time for documents to minutes, according to Debbie Somers, a senior advisor in the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Systems at the SSA. That process can take weeks or even months now, Somers said.

To put the new system into production, the SSA partnered with IT vendors IBM, Harris Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., the regional health information organization (RHIO) and several health care providers, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

The technology partnership represents a first step toward the creation of the (NHIN), a federal initiative that began 14 months ago and is a key part of .

The project at the SSA represents the first example of health care data being exchanged between a RHIO and a federal agency. The goal of the NHIN effort is to enable secure access to health care data as well as real-time information sharing among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and federal agencies such as the SSA and the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, regardless of location or the applications that are being used.