The Health Information Exchange (HIE) market is the Wild West right now. Vendors are telling us that theyre seeing an unprecedented level of activity both for private and public HIEs. Private HIEs are being set-up by large and small healthcare organizations to more tightly align affiliated physicians to a hospital or IDN to drive referrals and longer term, better manage transitions in care in anticipation of payment reform. Public HIEs are those state driven initiatives that have blossomed with the $560M+ of federal funding via the HITECH Act.
But this mad rush is creating some problems.
While the private HIEs seem to have their act together in putting together their Request for Proposals (RFPs), such is not the case for the state-driven initiatives. Rather then formulating a long-term strategy for the HIE by performing a needs assessment for their state, setting priorities and laying out a phased, multi-year strategy to get there, far too many states are trying to “boil the ocean” with RFPs that list every imaginable capability that will all magically go live within a couple of years of contract reward. Now it is hard to say who is at fault for these RFPs, is it the state or the consultants they have contracted with that formulated these lofty, unreachable goals, but this is a very real problem and unfortunately, the feds are providing extremely little guidance to the states on best practices.
While the above is more of a short-term concern, longer-term we may have a bigger problem on our hands. The proliferation of private HIEs, coupled with state-driven initiatives with very little in the way of standards for data governance, sharing and use (this includes consent both within a state and across state lines) has the very real potential to create a ungodly, virtually intractable mess that will be impossible to manage.
So maybe it is time to rethink what we are doing before we get to far down this road.
What if we were to say, as a country, that much like Eisenhower did during his presidency to establish the Interstate Highway system, we made the decision that it is the public interest to lay down the network for an “interstate” system for the secure electronic transport of health information? And rather than be cheap about it as we have done in the past dedicating only modest funding (e.g., NHIN CONNECT), let’s really make the investment necessary to make this work.
Yes, it won’t be cheap, but think of the alternative – 50 states, countless regions all with their own HIE. Yes, states are required under HITECH to work collaboratively with neighboring states, but this will not lead to enough consistency to create a truly networked nation for the delivery of quality healthcare for all US citizens.
It is indeed time to take a stand for much like Eisenhower’s Interstate system, which I had the pleasure to enjoy as I traveled cross-country this week from Boston to my beloved mountains of Colorado, such an interstate system for the delivery of health information at the point of care will be something all citizens will benefit from. And taking a cue from the image above, rather than a “Symbol of Freedom” it would become a Symbol of Health.
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