The Connecting for Health Team, with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) serving as prime, is one of four contractors creating architectures and pilots for a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). CSC was selected for this industry-leading project by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The objective of a NHIN is to allow health care payers and providers to share individual health records and clinical data electronically and securely. ONC’s goal in funding this project is to accelerate market interest and stimulate investment in electronic health records and clinical data sharing over the next ten years.

As the pilots are released, we are seeing the barriers to investment disappear. Before, people didn’t know what to buy and didn’t want to get caught with something that would be out of date quickly. Now, with standards and architectures defined, health organizations can invest with confidence.

Building a Nationwide Team
CSC brought together an industry-wide response for interconnecting healthcare organizations in Boston, Indianapolis and Mendocino County, California. The project includes cross-industry collaborative activities involving Federal agencies and other NHIN contractors. Activities are facilitated by leading not-for-profit healthcare industry organizations including the Markle Foundation, the eHealth Inititiative Foundation, and Regenstrief Institute, among others. The project also benefits from contributions from a broad spectrum of the technology industry, including some of the industry’s largest companies and specialized on-the-ground expertise from the health care software industry.

CSC leads a team of healthcare systems experts in network security, healthcare data, application development and other disciplines, contributing industry-leading expertise from the multi-disciplinary subcontractor partners. The other members of the Connecting for Health Team include:

• Browsersoft
  
• Business Networks International, Inc
  
• Center for Information Technology Leadership
  
• Connecting for Health
  
• DB Consulting Group, Inc.
  
• eHealth Initiative
  
• Electronic Health Record Vendors Association (EHRVA)
  
• Indiana Health Information Exchange
  
• MA-SHARE
  
• Mendocino HRE
  
• Microsoft Corporation
  
• Regenstrief Institute
  
• SiloSmashers
  
• Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Connecting the U.S.
In order to implement the NHIN, the teams addressed and integrated policy, process and industry legal issues and decisions together with technology. Their goal is to produce a functioning system to demonstrate the feasibility of widespread health information exchange across key institutions – hospitals, health plans, physician offices, and others – involved in delivering healthcare in the U.S.

Each of the four consortia are designing and implementing a standards-based network prototype. The prototypes must test patient identification and record locator services; user authentication, access control and other security protections and specialized network functions, as well as test the feasibility of large-scale deployment. The consortia will share ideas and information about the architecture and prototypes with each other and with the public in order to accelerate secure and seamless exchange of health information across the nation. In fact, the architecture design for each of the networks will be placed in the public domain to stimulate others to develop further innovative approaches to implementing health information technology.

By having the four consortia each develop a solution, the ONC hoped to have multiple successes that would address the needs of different stakeholders. CSC has developed a thin client solution that relies on medical data at the source rather than a central database. With no national health identifier, finding an individual’s medical records might be a challenge. The prototype neatly solves locating the correct records and providing only that information that the requestor is authorized to see.

Benefits
Defining a NHIN architecture and demonstrating that it can be built securely is an essential first step in establishing a national mechanism for dealing with major events such as hurricanes, potential pandemics and other health disasters. This architecture will provide the foundation for controlling health care costs and increasing performance as a nation in improving health care and protecting patients from errors or poorly delivered care.

For More Information

Read more about CSC's role in Health IT.