Five years after the ONC created the State Health Information Exchange Program, investing $564 million to help states develop and implement secure data exchange networks, the ONC contracted with the NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct a multi-year analysis of the program.
NORC evaluated the HIEs of Iowa, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming.
Here are three key lessons learned regarding HIEs, presented by NORC.
1. It is important to set tangible, intermediate goals to keep stakeholders engaged and energized by seeing continual progress. Doing so can also help stakeholders more easily identify and make corrections if needed.
2. Larger health systems tended to significantly impact the development of HIE services by either providing participants and data to the systems or acting as competitors, by which the lack of their data hurt the value proposition of state systems.
3. All HIE systems encountered IT challenges, including developer limitations, lack of interoperability, issues with data capture and quality of data. In response to developer limitations, several stakeholders turned to a best-of-breed approach regarding their technology and worked with different vendors for different needs. Regarding interoperability issues, stakeholders are pushing the adoption of certain data standards among HIE participants.
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