NEW YORK, Oct. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --More than half the U.S. population and their health care providers could soon have access to health data shared across multiple states and systems. A public-private partnership of states, public agencies, federally-funded health information exchanges (HIEs) and health information technology (HIT) companies has established a program to test and certify electronic health records (EHRs) and other health IT to enable reliable transfer of data within and across organizational and state boundaries.

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High costs, technical differences and long wait times for interface development are barriers to sharing health data among health care providers and across state lines. The coalition of 15 states, 37 technology vendors and 34 HIEs, representing more than 50 percent of the U.S. population, has created a robust, highly automated testing program to verify that, once tested, a system is capable of exchanging health information with many other systems. With this testing, a single set of standardized, easy-to-implement connections can support communication among systems.

The effort is being jointly led by the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup, a New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC)-led consortium of states and vendors; and Healtheway, the newly formed public-private partnership of the eHealth Exchange, a network of 34 public and private organizations representing hundreds of hospitals, thousands of providers and millions of patients across the country.

This effort will build on and accelerate consensus on national standards, adopting EHR certification criteria and testing procedures as relevant and finalized for Stage 2 of meaningful use. Members of both groups will continue to provide feedback from these real-world implementations to the national health IT standard setting initiativesestablished by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).

"Today's announcement brings together several activities supported by ONC over the past years: a core set of national standards, an Accredited Certification Body, the Public-private partnership that has emerged from the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange, and the convening power of New York and other State Health Information Exchange grantees," said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. "We look forward to working with this consortium to continue progress on interoperability and secure health information exchange, and to reflect what is learned in national standards as necessary."

The coalition selected the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), the most experienced HIT certification organization in the U.S., to carry out the testing. As the compliance testing body, CCHIT will certify that the interfaces between the HIT and HIEs are consistent across multiple states and systems. CCHIT is also an Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) authorized certification body and is an accredited testing laboratory for EHRs. CCHIT is collaborating withAEGIS.neton the testing software, which is being developed under an open source license.

"The collaboration between the states and vendors to address a shared marketplace gap and work toward a mutual vision has been one of the remarkable aspects of this effort," said David Whitlinger, Executive Director of NYeC. "And momentum is building within both communities as states grow their HIE networks by working with the EHR and HIE vendors to provide seamless integration and clinical workflow, taking the market to a new level for the benefit of patients."

"The testing program Healtheway has developed with NYeC is the key to realizing secure and interoperable exchange of health information across organizational and geographic boundaries," said Michael Matthews, Healtheway President and Board Chair. "The launch of a compliance testing program will enable the eHealth Exchange to more than double participation and connectivity over the next 9 to 12 months."

Realizing that merging efforts with other states would create economies of scale and provide the vendor community with a single, consistent set of specifications, NYeC created the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup last year. Over the course of 18 months, the group has developed technical and test specifications to address the major use cases of interoperable exchange. Around the same time, plans took shape to transition the NwHIN Exchange to function outside the federal government as a public-private network, now called the eHealth Exchange. To expand nationwide HIE, Healtheway and NYeC formed a strategic partnership to enable technology systems, public and private providers and health information organizations (HIOs) to have access to more efficient testing.

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Health IT Testing Program Will Enable Health Data Sharing For More Than Half Of U.S. Patients And Their Providers