The push toward interoperability is not new. But amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the need for secure and efficient data sharing has become more urgent than ever.
To help facilitate greater interoperability during the once-in-a-century public health crisis, six health information exchanges have created a consortium.
Dubbed the Consortium for State and Regional Interoperability, the group has three main goals, said Morgan Honea, CEO of the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO), one of the consortium’s founding members. These are knowledge and technology infrastructure sharing, joint service offerings for the government and market, and federal advocacy to advance data sharing nationwide.
Along with CORHIO, the following HIEs are the founding members of the consortium:
“The consortium formed now because the health information exchange industry has never experienced a point in time where nationwide interoperability has been more important,” said Honea in an email.
The founding members saw a need for closer collaboration between HIEs, health plans, public health agencies and Medicaid agencies. Further, they saw a need for data-sharing infrastructures that extend across state and regional boundaries as well as increased investment in such infrastructures, Honea added.
So far, each of the founding HIEs has been supporting the public health departments in states they serve with pandemic response activities, including supporting test ordering and scheduling and tracking hospital bed capacity.
Now, the HIEs will together develop new solutions and create initiatives to meet their goals.
First, the consortium is working to pilot a national dashboard of Covid-19 test results, said Honea.
Second, it will work to develop surveillance tools for physician offices and skilled nursing facilities that gather data on disease syndromes. This can help provide public health experts with aggregated data to identify real-time disease indicators, Honea said.
Research backs up the value of HIEs in disease tracking. A 2020 study from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University shows that using HIEs to prepopulate forms for notifiable disease reports increases reporting and helps ensure that the information provided is complete. This type of comprehensive reporting is especially important in the battle against the highly transmissible and deadly new coronavirus.
In addition, the consortium plans to deploy nationwide hospital admit, discharge, transfer alerting and tracking capabilities. This will allow HIEs to capture and share this data in real time, which can help improve care coordination and prevent unnecessary costs, said Honea.
Photo: DrAfter123, Getty Images
