Researchers from Harvard University, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Boston Veterans Affairs Hospital surveyed all known regional health information organizations (RHIOs) in the United States in mid-2008. They examined two main outcome measures: whether the RHIO was operational and the percent of operating costs covered by revenue from participants.
Operational Concerns
"Exchanging a narrow set of data and involving a broad group of stakeholders were independently associated with a higher likelihood of being operational," study authors concluded. "Involving hospitals and ambulatory physicians, and securing early funding from participants were associated with a higher likelihood of financial viability, while early grant funding seemed to diminish the likelihood." Traditionally, HIEs that are grant-funded at the start suffer when the funds run out and solid participant funding commitments have not been established.
The study, "Characteristics Associated with Regional Health Information Organization Viability," was published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The current issue is available at http://jamia.bmj.com.
Based on a survey of 1,043 licensed physicians in Massachusetts, a separate study in the issue examines physician attitudes toward health information exchange. Researchers concluded that surveyed physicians generally have a positive perception of HIE, but are not willing to pay for participation and have concerns about privacy.
HIE Firm Opens Platform to Developers
Medicity Inc. is opening its health information exchange platform - a core application for routing data - to third-party software developers to create new applications that run on the platform but are downloadable to users.
The Salt Lake City-based vendor is not placing its source code on the open source market, emphasized the company's chairman and CEO Kipp Lassetter, M.D. "It's not a first step toward moving to open source, but definitely defining the system as an open system."
Technically, the company, which claims access to 700 hospitals and 25,000 physician practices, will open an application programming interface to the platform.
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