Massachusetts HIE Update

Yesterday, the HIT Council met to review Massachusetts Healthcare IT progress.

Here is the presentation we used.

The meeting began with a presentation from Holyoke Medical Center, describing an ideal subnetwork - a local HIE that meets the needs of local stakeholders while also connecting to the state HIE, enabling any authorized stakeholder in the Commonwealth to send and receive summaries to/from the Holyoke medical community.

Next, I gave an update on BIDMC's progress.   BIDMC is now live sending immunization transactions to the Department of Public Health over the state HIE.  We're also sending 4000 transactions per day to the quality data center at the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.  Today we go live with Network Health for transition of care exchange and in the upcoming weeks we'll go live with Partners healthcare for encounter summary exchange.

Next, we reviewed HISP to HISP trust fabric approaches and consent issues.   For HISP to HISP exchange we agreed that we need both authentication (who you are) and authorization (what you can do).   Although certificate trust bundles like those offered from DirectTrust.org can address federated authentication issues, we'll likely implement authorization within the state HIE as we move from "push" models to "pull" which enable authorized users to retrieve records on demand.  

Massachusetts is an opt-in consent state and we reviewed recommendations for consent processes and language.   Our current recommendation is for HIE participants to obtain opt in consent during the general consent for care signing process and to specifically enumerate the state HIE as a means to share data in the notice of privacy practices.

We reviewed the FY14 plans for the Massachusetts eHealth Institute, the organizations in Massachusetts that accelerates EHR adoption and assists with connecting the "last mile" of provider practices to the HIE.

Finally we reviewed our plans for creating a statewide master patient index, record locator service, and the supporting web services to enable query/response ("pull") health information exchange.  We're on track for an early 2014 go live and all funding is in place.

A great meeting.