WEDI Seeks Help for New Report on Next-Generation HIE

The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange is looking for industry volunteers to help put together a definitive roadmap for guiding the next generation of health information exchange technologies.

The organization expects in December to publish the 2013 WEDI Report, hoping to have the same success it had 20 years ago with an industry-transforming report on EDI that spurred the HIPAA administrative and financial transaction sets. WEDI announced the new initiative in early April along with an initial steering committee.

The new report will identify the impacts of administrative and clinical technologies during the past two decades and lessons learned, as well as the likely role of emerging technologies in coming years. Dr. Louis Sullivan, former Health and Human Services Secretary who formed WEDI in 1991, will serve as chair of a steering committee overseeing the new report.

WEDI is soliciting stakeholders to participate in four workgroups to identify business model attributes in four areas that the steering committee, members and advisors identified as major trends that can provide a framework for the initiative:

* Consumer engagement through improved access to pertinent data;

* Alternative payment models and requisite business, information and exchange requirements;

* Existing standards for exploring ways to better align administrative and clinical information capture, linkage and exchange; and

* Business cases for innovative encounter models using existing and emergent technologies.

More information on the workgroups is available here, with a link to apply for membership in a workgroup soon to be available. Information on the framework of the report and the steering committee members is here.