HIEs are Teaming Up
Last week, news broke that two Health Information Exchanges, one in Colorado and one in Arizona, are working together to cover the entirety of both states. COVID-19 has certainly brought public health reporting capabilities to the forefront of American life, and these two HIEs are seeing a need to expand both the depth and breadth of their data.
The HIEs, Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO) and Arizona’s Health Current, are in neighboring states, and realized that they may have many things in common, including patients or services. The two organizations quickly realized that they had much more in common, including goals, culture, and values.
By working together, the two HIEs are going to be able to avoid the pitfall that plagues many regional sources of data, which is interoperability. It’s great to have the idea that you can cover more ground and offer a more complete picture of population health, but it doesn’t start working until you have systems that can effectively communicate with one another.
Between the two organizations, well over a thousand hospitals are represented, and if the HIEs they report to are better able to communicate with one another, these hospitals will increase their interoperability with one another as well.
Things are starting slow and the HIEs are currently looking for overlapping data points that can be integrated with one another, but the ultimate plan is for them to be able to share a single technology to manage their data.
This test of connectivity is hopefully just the beginning for HIEs, as they are hoping that this collaboration can form the framework for more HIEs to do the same thing. While each data center will still need their own governance, priorities, and autonomy, there are still plenty of places where technology and economies of scale can produce efficiencies and avoid developing the same things separately.
Now this doesn’t mean that all HIEs are suddenly going to merge and have a single way of accomplishing their goals. Different state and local governments will always have differing priorities which will have to be managed by their respective HIEs. Where we will really see an impact on this type of collaboration is at the national and federal level, where common sets of requirements will allow agencies to get better data faster from regional sources.
Not every difference in data may be earth shattering, but they’re still enough to make reporting difficult. It’s something we see with our healthcare clients all the time. The same date on an incoming set of lab results might read January 1st, 2020, 1/1/20, Jan-1 2020, or something else entirely. That’s why when our software reads the data on a document, it normalizes it to match the format that your technology is expecting. If you’d like to learn more about how we can make your disparate data integrate more easily, please reach out.
