3 IT Lessons Learned From ONC's Western States HIE Consortium

A group of 13 states came together in 2011 to iron out the process, technology, policy and governance issues to enable interstate health information exchange via Direct. In collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the Western States Consortium (WSC) on Friday published its final report from the ongoing efforts.

"As a result of these pilots, providers in Oregon and California are currently exchanging data across state lines," John Rancourt, a program analyst and Presidential Management Fellow working with the state HIE Cooperative Agreement Program wrote on the Health IT Buzz blog. “One of the technical solutions required for the pilots was a process for querying multiple interstate provider directories and providing accurate results, which is also known as federation of provider directories. To execute this, the pilot’s solution required implementation of several standards in novel ways.”