This week, the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Association of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) submitted a response to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) regarding the Nationwide Health Information Network. The ONC’s Request for Information on the creation of a structure for governance of the NwHIN was issued in May.
The EHR Association responded in its letter that the initial focus should be on the governance model itself and how to establish, validate, and enforce Conditions for Trusted Exchange (CTEs) rather than what the initial set of CTEs should be. The NwHIN, a national health IT infrastructure being developed on open source code to improve the secure exchange of healthcare data among providers and consumers, is intended to be standards-based but also flexible and adaptive to changes in healthcare IT.
Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) will be among the major stakeholders participating in the NwHIN, as will Care Delivery Organizations (CDOs) utilizing EHR systems like Allscripts MyWay, McKesson Practice Choice, and Medisoft Clinical. Both Allscripts and McKesson are members of the EHR Association, and Microwize Technology sells and supports their physician EHR products.