What Is Moving National Health Information Exchange Forward?

Health information exchange (HIE) occurs at all levels, but none may prove to be as far-reaching as nationwide exchange. The eHealth Exchange (née the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange) has come a long way from its earliest beginnings as an initiative spurred on by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to recent developments which saw it spun off into its own public-private partnership run by Healtheway.

Last week, the organization celebrated a significant increase in participation in the eHealth Exchange. EHRIntelligence.com caught up with Healtheway’s Executive Director Mariann Yeager to discuss the growth of the eHealth Exchange and the challenges ahead for the exchange in particular and nationwide HIE in general. As Yeager explains, the real value of nationwide HIE is in forging more efficient connections at all levels of healthcare.

How has nationwide HIE advanced over the past year?

We spent the last year working diligently with the vendor community and the eHealth Exchange community as a whole to build a rigorous testing process. We knew that there was interest building in joining this growing community of exchange partners and that in order for this to work on a large-scale basis we would need to make sure that we could actually test and has some assurance of interoperability. [...]