MedAllies Selected to Participate in ONC's Clinical Data Direct Project

MedAllies, a health information service provider in New York's Hudson Valley, has been tapped to be part of the Direct Project, a groundbreaking national effort to fast track electronic information exchange.

Earlier this month, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT announced the launch of the first of several pilots for the Direct Project, which calls for cooperative efforts by organizations in the health care and information technology sectors.

The Hudson Valley has been selected as one of seven pilot sites slated to go live this year. MedAllies, which is working with multiple health IT vendors, was specifically mentioned during the recent White House press conference announcing the program.

MedAllies has fully engaged clinicians throughout the Hudson Valley and their disparate EHR vendor partners to create a Direct Project that will push critical clinical information across EHR systems to support care coordination and transitions of care, in a manner that is completely consistent with the clinicians' established EHR workflows. The project will focus on common care transition episodes:

• patient discharge from hospital back to their primary care physician; and
• a consultation request from a PCP to a specialist, then the clinical consultation from the specialist back to the PCP.

The clinical sites involved include Albany Medical Center, Asthma and Allergy Associates of Westchester, Community Care Physicians, Health Quest Medical Center, Institute for Family Health, Scarsdale Medical Group, LLP; and their EHR vendor partners: Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Greenway, NextGen and Siemens.

MedAllies anticipates providing a national network capable of supporting interoperability of all physicians using certified EHR systems by the end of 2011. It will demonstrate the technological capabilities of its Direct Project throughout the HIMSS11 Conference in Orlando, Feb. 20-24.

The demonstrations at the HIMSS11 Conference will showcase the technological capabilities of its Direct Project over four days of the conference, with live demonstrations that include all its vendor partners. MedAllies will also offer interoperability demonstrations showcasing clinical examples of interoperability capabilities and use cases showing the secure transfer of patient clinical data from one provider to another. A video demonstration of the MedAllies Direct Project will also be presented in the Office of the National Coordinator showcase area.

"The Direct Project is a groundbreaking national effort by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. It represents a totally new way of doing business," said A. John Blair III, MD, M.B.A., chief executive officer, MedAllies. "ONC's Direct Project benefits providers and patients by improving the direct transport of health information, making it secure, fast, inexpensive and interoperable.

Advanced primary care models that emphasize care coordination and improved care transitions are enabled by this technology. Using Direct Project enables a care provider to send and receive critical clinical information connecting them to all other health care stakeholders across the country."

Direct Project, a public/private collaborative, is an effort to find a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients via the Internet.

The open-source approach fosters collaboration among competitors and drives innovation. "This is an important milestone in our journey to achieve secure health information exchange, and it means that health care providers large and small will have an early option for electronic exchange of information supporting their most basic and frequently needed uses," Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology, said at the press conference announcing the launch of Direct Project. "Other efforts are also going forward at full-throttle to build a comprehensive structure of health information exchange. But by bringing together health care and IT companies, including competitors, to rapidly produce a system that supports basic clinical delivery and public health needs, we will be able to more quickly start building ele