California sees first successful health info exchange public demo

By EgovAsia Editors | Jul 22, 2010

Mirth Corporation, commercial open source healthcare information technology company, successfully powered California's first publicly staged multi-organization demonstration of NHIN Direct standards and technologies. The demonstration included secure clinical information exchange between healthcare providers across three prominent California-based Health Information Exchanges. It took place on July 9th at Redwood MedNet's 4th Annual HIE Conference in Santa Rosa.
 
Organizations participating in the landmark demonstration included the Redwood MedNet Health Information Exchange, as well as the Western Health Information Network from Long Beach, CA, and Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz. Technology partners supporting the initiative included Harris Corporation, MedPlus, creator of Care360, and Microsoft, developer of HealthVault, a personal health technology platform. 
 
The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) represents a set of federally architected standards for health information exchange, as well as "on ramp" tools to enable healthcare organizations to exchange health information more easily. NHIN Direct, a companion project sponsored by the department of Health and Human Services, seeks to enable simple, secure transport of health information between healthcare providers.
 
Redwood MedNet, which operates a health information exchange (HIE) service in Northern California based on the Mirth open source software, conceived and managed the NHIN Direct demonstration. "NHIN Direct is designed to accelerate adoption of HIE services," said Will Ross, Project Manager for Redwood MedNet.