I’ve been really fascinated by the work many hospital systems are doing to create a private HIE in their organization. As I wrote, I think that private HIE could lead to a nationwide HIE. It’s still a bit of a long shot, but I think it has more promise than the other HIE initiatives I’ve seen in action.
Along with my interest in private HIEs, I’ve also been fascinated by the switch to Vendor Neutral Archives (VNA) in the radiology space. In a VNA, you can store any medical image in the archive and it doesn’t matter what device you use to capture or view the image. Think about the flexibility that this provides. You’re no longer locked into a certain piece of imaging equipment or to a certain viewing application. Instead, you can switch as needed.
As I consider these two areas, it seems that a private HIE is the first step to having a vendor neutral archive. In fact, I’m not sure why more people haven’t applied the principles of vendor neutral archives to the EHR world. I imagine the challenge is in the complexity of the data. Sure, DICOM isn’t a simple piece of data either, but at least there are some DICOM standards that most medical imaging companies follow. The same can’t be said in the EHR world.
The problem now is that the term HIE has so much failure associated with it. I imagine that’s why we moved from RHIO to HIE as well. However, I think that the change from creating an HIE to a vendor neutral archive for EHR data would be a dramatic shift in thinking. This could be an important decision for a large hospital system. Instead of just trying to share data from EHR to EHR, what if they created a vendor neutral archive of all their EHR data such that your future EHR was built around that VNA instead of around a specific piece of software. I’m not sure there are many hospital CIOs brave enough to look this far out.
