The May Massachusetts HIT Council Meeting

Just as the national HIT Standards Committee meets every month and I record its deliberations on my blog, the Massachusetts HIT Council, a governance body for healthcare IT activities in the Commonwealth, meets monthly.   The Council is a multi-stakeholder body including public and private sector participants from every aspects of the healthcare system.

We met on Monday to review progress on State HIE implementation.   Here are the presentation materials.

In May, Tufts Medical Center will go live with transfer of care summaries sent to payers in support of disease management programs.

BIDMC will go live with immunization and reportable lab submissions to the Department of Public Health.   Also in May, BIDMC will go live with sending 4000 care summaries each day to our quality registry provider, the Massachusetts eHealth collaborative.

Holyoke Medical Center will go live with transfer of care summary transmission to its community providers in May.

27 implementation grants to stakeholders through the commonwealth have been awarded to accelerate connectivity to the state HIE backbone.

Meaningful Use Stage 2 and ACO formation have created a business case for data sharing and we'll see accelerating adoption over the next few months.

Lastly, Medicaid approved the funding for the second phase of the HIE - the community wide master patient index, record locator service and consent registry.   We'll have these built by the end of 2013.

It's an exciting time in Massachusetts - HIE has finally achieved the level of policy and technology maturity we've been anticipating for the past decade.