Kelly Cronin, Director
Chris Muir, Senior Program Analyst, Office or Programs and Coordination

 

The SLHIE project’s main objective is to provide a forum for ONC to work with states to ensure all health information exchange activities throughout the Unites States align.  This is a forum that enables ONC to disseminate information about the national agenda and for the states based efforts to inform the federal government thereby enabling a nationwide alignment of all health information exchange activities.

Nearly all 50 states have some form of a governance body that seeks to coordinate statewide health information exchange.  ONC is collaborating with state efforts because of their coordination roles within states.  These public-private initiatives are demonstrating that they can effectively engage State governments to reach state goals for quality and cost-effective healthcare while forging new collaborations for data sharing across regions and among organizations that have traditionally used data for competitive purposes.  These efforts are ideally situated to identify and address statewide barriers to health information exchange (HIE).  They seek to balance the interests of all state HIE stakeholders and provide a conduit for consensus on the adoption of state standards, policies, procedures and practices.

This is the third-year of the project that has been contracted with the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the Foundation of Research and Education (FORE).  The project seeks to identify and then disseminate principles and best practices to guide developing state-level health information exchange organizations in the areas governance, accountability, practices and financial sustainability.  This project is guided by a steering committee of 13 of the leading state-level HIEs.  However, the project aims to engage all currently-known statewide efforts for dissemination of project findings and collaboration on important issues that will lead to interoperability.  Through this forum of engaging all statewide organizations, ONC will ensure that statewide efforts are consistent with the Federal health information exchange agenda.

The first two years of the project resulted in:

• Identified the important contributions that can be made by state-level HIEs including their role as convener, coordinator and, in some cases, operators of health information exchanges;
• Identified sustainability considerations related to these HIE roles, services, and business models;
• Developed considerations related to ensuring HIEs are accountable and acting in the public’s interest;
• Produced findings and project recommendations including the need for State governments to formally recognize the state-level entities and authorize them to fully accomplish their unique roles;
• Developed a framework to assess state level organization policies and practices for access, use and control so that multi-jurisdictional exchange is enabled; and
• Established guiding principles for developing state-level HIEs.

The scope of work for deliverables due at the end of March 2009 includes:

• Identifying models of SLHIE sustainability and the conditions necessary to enable the success of the models;
• Identifying criteria for HIE accountability that could be used in an accountability model (results will feed into other accountability efforts from the State Alliance for e-Health and AHIC successor);
• Developing implementation guidance for obtaining consistent HIE organizational privacy and security policies and practices across jurisdictions related to data access, use and control, thus enabling HIE-to-HIE data exchange; and
• Establishing the state-level HIE forum to disseminate the results and develop coordination to obtain consistent policies and practices across the jurisdictions to enable HIE-to-HIE data exchange. 

For more information and project deliverables, please visit www.slhie.org.