In April 2011 five leading US health systems joined forces to create the Care Continuity Consortium, and promised to achieve a clinically operational secured sharing of health information between them by early 2012, this seems an aggressive challenge. But it also drew some respect to see pioneers in the use of electronic medical records systems such as Geisinger Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare and Group Health Cooperative, engage into national level of information exchange.
They committed to leverage existing standards and IHE profiles already selected by the Nation-wide Health Information Network (NwHIN-Exchange) to enable a national-scale health information query service. At HIMSS last month they showed how this group supports their clinicians in their practice to access patient summaries information from different health systems.
They are sending the message that the current available standards and profile, do work and can be successfully implemented. This interoperability serves well the clinicians, and patient consent can be managed effectively with large scale interoperability being a matter of political will.
Further development will continue to be done to dial in more and more functionality, efficiency, and privacy. An important message is that the system can fill a need, does support more use-cases than Direct, and is more automateible due to a mature metadata model.
Add the CCC network to the likes of NwHIN-Exchange and the European wide epSOS. There are more to come, but of course I must keep them a secret.
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I'm a long time follower of your blog. Thanks for your work!
ReplyDeleteI wish CCC would disseminate their learning on using the standards across multiple organizations. Beacon communities have been disappointing in this regard too.
How do they reconcile conflicting policies?
Which areas did they run into different interpretations of the IHE standards?
What gaps did they find in the specifications? How did they address those gaps?
I'm on their linked in group, and have posed some of the questions, but it's very quiet on there :)
What is the name of the Linkedin group? I'd like to join. I'm working on this project now at Mayo and will try to get some answers to your questions.
DeleteI don't know how CCC is communicating. I have not had contact in a while. I do know that CCC is working with the InteropWG and NwHIN-Exchange. Bringing these three groups together is a good thing.
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