During a webinar Wednesday, Claudia Williams, director of the State HIE Program at the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), said proposed standards for HIEs should be published in the July.
The ONC will first publish a request for information, followed by a notice of proposed rule making and then a final rule.
Williams said the government does not intend to set up HIEs or restrict them to one type - whether national, state, regional, public or private. The government's role will be to establish the vocabulary and the code sets to ensure information contained in electronic health records systems can be exchanged no matter which network platform is used.
"A national health information network is a set of standards, services and policies that allow information to flow across the Internet in a safe and secure way. We also do not expect there will be one solution, or one architecture or a one-size fits all [approach]. We think multiple approaches will sit side by side," Williams said.
The government will use both incentives and penalties to encourage providers to exchange information in a certified way. Williams called the HIE program "voluntary" but with a validation process. Criteria will focus on data transport, querying, provider directories, privacy and security expectations, and business practices of every validated entity.
HIEs will allow physicians to exchange patient treatment data, prescriptions and radiological images such as X-rays, with other medical facilities. Standardizing data transfer protocols will allow that information to be exchanged with non-affiliated facilities. For example, a specialist from a cancer treatment center could share test results with a patient's primary care physician in a different hospital network or different part of the country.
With regard to helping to build state-level HIEs, the ONC will focus on standards for electronic prescriptions, the exchange of patient care summaries, lab test results, public health statistics reporting, and overall patient engagement in healthcare.
Williams said the ONC recognizes that "every state is different, so there cannot be a cookie cutter approach."
"You'll see a wide variety strategies ... depending on what's already in place in a state. We're focusing our efforts on the certification part of it. It's not that we want to be the builder. What we want to do is have the standards, the policy and the services that we're enabling through our regulations and through our standards work," she said. Williams explained that the government will also be consulting with the private sector to establish the "building block" needed to create cheap yet valuable exchanges.
"We think of exchange and interoperability as a journey and not a destination. We're not going to be done this year. We're not going to be done next year, but we're going to be continually evolving," Williams said. "We're going to be moving quickly into a world where care coordination and care management [are] across [a network] that's distributed."
At the end of March almost $5 billion had been paid out as incentives to 76,000 healthcare providers for deploying electronic health records systems, the ONC's Health IT policy committee reported at a in Washington on Wednesday. The payments are made to providers who meet the first of three stages of so-called "meaningful use" of EHRs, and were reimbursed for a portion of the cost of implementing them.
"Not a single hospital has been rejected. All have succeeded in getting their payments," Williams said. "We've seen tremendous progress across the board in health IT adoption."
One of the most prominent aspects of , which is undergoing a six-month comment period, is the requirement for healthcare providers to be able to share patient medical data among healthcare providers through HIEs.
However, three-quarters of the time, primary care providers do not get simple discharge information from hospitals on their patients, said Williams, citing the latest survey figures from 2010.
"Only 20% of hospitals are exchanging clinical records electronically in 2010," Williams said. "A lot of information is not getting to its desired destination quickly enough or accurately enough. We're in a world where a lot of patient-information sharing still occurs on paper."
Williams pointed to as the model for how patient data exchange should be promoted. E-prescribing was adopted quickly in 2009/2010 because it offered both penalties and incentives to insurance payers and healthcare providers as well as a standardized method to deploy it, Williams said.
E-prescribing was used by 58% of all physicians in 2011, up from one in 10 in 2010. In 2011, 570 million prescriptions were routed electronically, according to from e-prescribing giant Surescripts.
"I think what we're looking to do is put in place the same building blocks of motivation, of standards, of incentives, and of professional expectation that have really driven such a rapid increase in e-prescribing," William said.
The ONC expects that this year adoption will climb quickly with the more rigorous requirements in Stage 2 of Meaningful Use. Standards around information exchange will also spur adoption by driving down the cost of exchanging data between healthcare facilities. Williams said laws spurring insurance payment reform, which will focus on the quality of care and its outcome and not the amount of care provided, should also help spur HIE adoption.
"Our goal is to have information to follow patients wherever and whenever they seek care and support better care coordination," she said.
The HIE marketplace is a cornucopia of services, both public and private.
The federal government has already poured millions of dollars into creating HIEs at the regional and that act as engines for providers to exchange patient information. The federal government is also in the process of developing a , which it hopes will allow patients and their health information to travel anywhere.
Private vendors, , have also created -based patient health information exchanges.
Yet the market for health information exchange is still nascent.
Hospitals and private practices will likely focus on creating private regional HIEs (RHIOs), which connect to other organizations in their region through standards, as promoted by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) and Health Level Seven International (HL7).
HL7 and IHE are global nonprofit organizations involved in developing standards for the interoperability of health information technology. The term HL7 is also used to describe those standards based on the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. IHE promotes HL7 and standards such as Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), which is focused on sharing digital images between providers.
Williams said the federal government recognizes there will not be a single model for deploying HIEs, although it wants a single standard for exchanging the data so that all HIEs can speak the same language. Different protocols for data exchange are making HIEs expensive to deploy, she said.
"Exchange volume is relatively low and the cost of exchanges is often higher than we would like," Williams said. "[But] we're seeing that 70% of hospitals say they plan to invest in HIE services this year."
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .
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