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NHIN Direct would enable small healthcare organizations to ramp up HIE quickly by offering them basic network transport services for sharing records securely over the Internet.

Time is of the essence, since providers must be able to show by late 2011 that they can participate in health information exchange in order to qualify for federal healthcare IT incentives.

But offering shortcuts for these providers might throw a wrench into state plans to bundle such services into the menu of HIE offerings they plan to market to providers in their states, workgroup members acknowledged at a meeting.

It would certainly call into question the plans of those state HIE s which had planned to offer secure networking transport exclusively.

Some states had planned to offer secure routing along with more advanced HIE services such as patient locator, translation services, document discovery, aggregation and quality measurement. But NHIN Direct may bite into revenues – at least from transport services – expected by some HIE s.

The Massachusetts organization uses a health information exchange that includes a proprietary option for providers that use a particular vendor, as well as a comprehensive NHIN gateway. “The value that we provide is working on the model that the participant wants and defining the documentation requirements,” Micky Tripathi, chief executive officer of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and a member of the workgroup said.

Yet despite altered business models, states will continue to have role in enabling other aspects of secure HIE, such as identity management assurance and authentication services, according to a workgroup planning  document.

Source : NHIN

You can get more details about Healthcare Informatics & its related topics from our Healthcare Informatics User Group.