California Employees Back State HIE

HDM Breaking News, April 24, 2008

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has endorsed and will support the statewide health information exchange being developed by the California Regional Health Information Organization, known as CalRHIO.

Sacramento-based CalPERS, serving 1.2 million state and local public employees, retirees and dependents, has directed its health insurers to negotiate contract terms with CalRHIO. These payers include Anthem Blue Cross (formerly Blue Cross of California), Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente. CalPERS further will work with CalRHIO to ensure the privacy and security of member information transferred over the HIE.

CalRHIO is supporting development of local HIEs that will interoperate to form a statewide network. Its first project is to improve the availability of patient data to physicians in high-volume emergency departments.

Vendor partners of CalRHIO include Medicity Inc., Perot Systems Corp., Hewlett-Packard Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. More information is available at calpers.ca.gov and calrhio.org.

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