Health IT company declares victory in NHIN trial to send and receive patient medical record summary

The testing was paid for by the government, the Health and Human Services Department. Each location sent a summary of the patient’s medical record, and received the summary. This appears to be a direct transfer without the use of any personal health records in the interim, so other than the test, it appears the areas of privacy and permission with the project are still up in the air. BD

After an official test of the Nationwide Health Information Network, a health IT company is declaring victory. MedPlus, a subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics Inc., announced that it had demonstrated interoperability between its regional health information exchange clients (HIEs) and the others participating in the test. MedPlus is supporting three of the original nine NHIN contractors.

However, the MedPlus announcement cautioned that “there still is a great deal of work to be done before the [NHIN] initiative can go live nationwide.” Testing of NHIN functionality in transmitting other kinds of data is scheduled for the remainder of this year.
The NHIN program aims to establish a standards-based, secure system that uses the Internet to send patients’ medical records from one health care provider to another, regardless of location within the United States. Records would be transmitted only when needed for the care of the patient.

The other two MedPlus customers are the New York Clinical Information Exchange and the Long Beach (Calif.) Network for Health. The NHIN development program is sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT at the Health and Human Services Department.