Leading Health Care and Information Technology Groups Endorse Common Framework for Health Information Exchange to Support Improvements in Health and Healthcare

Thirteen Groups Collaborate in Responding to Federal Government's RFI on National Health Information Network

January 18, 2005 (New York, NY and Washington, DC) Thirteen major health and information technology organizations, in an unprecedented joint collaboration, today endorsed a "Common Framework" to support improved health information exchange in the United States while protecting patient privacy. The collaborating organizations have identified the vital design elements - of standards, policies, and methods-for creating a new information environment that would allow health care professionals, institutions, and individual Americans to exchange health information in order to improve patient care. These recommendations were developed in response to the Request for Information related to a "National Health Information Network" issued by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) within the Department of Health and Human Services in November 2004.

The new health information environment should be based on:

• Open, consensus-driven and non-proprietary standards and common methods for their adoption
• Connectivity built on the Internet and other existing networks
• Uniform policies that protect privacy, assure security, and support existing trust relationships.

The collaborative also recommends the use of financial incentives for the adoption of standards-based information technology in health care, citing opportunities to leverage this environment to produce value for patients, consumers, professionals, researchers, the public health community and, indeed, all sectors of our health care system. Finally, the recommendations describe the roles and structure of both the national and regional elements of this environment.

The collaborators noted that the new information environment must:

• Facilitate effective connectivity for the delivery of high quality healthcare
• Provide timely access to information
• Empower patients to access and control their own information and contribute to the quality of care provided
• Support the application of "intelligent" tools to improve health and health care
• Facilitate the appropriate aggregation of data for public health, research, and quality assessment, and
• Enable improvements in the quality of clinical care.

The group, coordinated by Connecting for Health, represents America's clinical leadership, academic institutions, health insurance plans, private industry, consumer and patient leaders, technology vendors, employers, and some of the foremost experts on health information management and information technology and includes:

• The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA): the national association of health information management professionals. AHIMA's 50,000 members are dedicated to the effective management of personal health information needed to deliver quality healthcare to the public.
  
  
• The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA): AMIA is dedicated to the development and application of medical informatics in support of patient care, teaching, research, and health care administration.
  
  
• The American National Standards Institute, Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (ANSI HISB): ANSI HISB provides an open, public forum for the voluntary coordination of healthcare informatics standards among all United States standard-developing organizations, professional societies, trade associations, private companies, federal agencies and others with more than 100 participants.
  
  
• The Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL): CITL is a non-profit research group based at Partners HealthCare in Boston and supported by HIMSS that assesses the value of clinical information technologies to help provider organizations maximize the value of their IT investments, to help technology firms understand how to improve the value proposition of their healthcare products, and to inform national healthcare IT policy discussions.
  
  
• The Connecting for Health Steering Group (CFH): Connecting for Health…A Public Private Collaborative was conceived and is operated by the Markle Foundation and receives additional support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Steering Group includes more than 60 diverse stakeholders from the public and private sector, committed to accelerating actions on a national basis to tackle the technical, financial and policy challenges of bringing healthcare into the information age.
  
  
• The eHealth Initiative (eHI): eHI is an independent, non-profit consortium of practicing clinicians, employers and healthcare purchasers, health plans, healthcare information technology vendors, hospitals and other healthcare providers, manufacturers, patient and consumer organizations, and public health agencies, whose mission is to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare through information and information technology.
  
  
• The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS): HIMSS is the healthcare industry's membership organization exclusively focused on providing leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology and management systems for the betterment of human health.
  
  
• Health Level Seven, Inc. (HL7): HL7's comprehensive suite of ANSI accredited standards for the exchange of demographic and clinical information provides the syntax and semantics for interoperability in a large number of provider organizations in the United States and around the world.
  
  
• HIMSS EHR Vendor Association (EHRVA): EHRVA represents more than 25 Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors with a mission to address national efforts relative to health information interoperability, standards, EHR certification, performance and quality measures, and other evolving government, industry and physician association initiatives and requests.
  
  
• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), (American College of Cardiology, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, and Radiological Society of North America): IHE drives standards adoption to address specific clinical needs, by creating a framework for passing vital health information seamlessly - from application to application, system to system and setting to setting - across the entire healthcare enterprise.
  
  
• Internet2: Internet2 is a consortium led by over 200 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet for a broad spectrum of organizations, including those in the health sciences.
  
  
• The Liberty Alliance Project: Liberty Alliance is a consortium of more than 150 organizations from across the globe, committed to developing open standards for federated network identity that support all current and emerging network devices.
  
  
• The National Alliance for Health Information Technology: The Alliance is a diverse partnership of influential leaders from all healthcare sectors working to achieve measurable improvements in patient safety, quality and efficiency through information technology.