The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is a collection of standards, protocols, legal agreements, specifications, and services that enables the secure exchange of health information over the internet. The NHIN is a key component of the nationwide health information technology strategy and will provide a common platform for health information exchange across diverse entities, within communities and across the country, helping to achieve the goals of the HITECH Act. This critical part of the national health IT agenda will enable health information to follow the consumer, be available for clinical decision making, and support appropriate use of healthcare information beyond direct patient care so as to improve public health.

The NHIN is evolving to meet the emerging needs of those needing to exchange health information securely over the Internet. The desired outcome is to promote a more effective marketplace, greater competition, and increased choice through accessibility to accurate information on healthcare costs, quality, and outcomes.

A NHIN Work Group (a new work group under the HIT Policy Committee) was formed to offer recommendations on creating a policy and technical framework that allows the internet to be used for the secure and standards-based exchange of health information, in a way that is open to all and fosters innovation. At a very high level, the new NHIN Work Group will hold discussions on how to use the internet to transform healthcare, including network security and access to health information. At the inaugural meeting on November 20, the work group reviewed and refined initial activities, including:

• Establishing an incremental approach that will generate immediate value (e.g., enable providers to achieve meaningful use) while creating the components that will be needed for more advanced information exchange (e.g., broadcast query).
• Describing the governance mechanism required for above.
• Providing recommendations to the HIT Policy Committee.

Activities of the HIT Policy Committee can be found at http://healthit.hhs.gov/policycommittee.

In the Trial Implementation stage, the American Health Information Community use cases became priorities for the NHIN. The program focused on identifying and establishing standards and policies with which to lay a foundation for interoperable health information exchange. An initial set of specifications of those standards and policies has been developed and adopted by several vendors. For more information, visit NHIN History & Background.

CONNECT is a Federal Health Architecture initiative to develop a federal software solution to link federal systems to the NHIN.  CONNECT was built in open source and has now been made available to the healthcare industry at large.  The CONNECT initiative takes the NHIN specifications and creates a production-ready open-source software solution that can be adopted by both federal and private entities. CONNECT provides a full software instantiation of the NHIN specifications and services. More information about the CONNECT initiative can be found at http://www.connectopensource.org.

Moving forward, priorities for capabilities to be included in the NHIN and technical documents will evolve to a model that directly supports achieving meaningful use of Health IT. For more information, visit The NHIN Tomorrow page.

For more information on the NHIN, contact the NHIN team at: nhin@hhs.gov.