Nextgov

Electronic health records began merging onto the information superhighway Wednesday with the launch of two pilot health information exchange (HIE) projects.

It's the first step toward securely transmitting personal health information over the Internet instead of by mail or fax, says Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT. The pilot programs were launched in Minnesota and Rhode Island, Blumenthal says in the Health IT Buzz blog. New York, Connecticut, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas and California are next.

The pilots are part of the Direct Project initiative to provide limited record exchange capabilities while a more robust exchange infrastructure is developed, say Blumenthal and Aneesh Chopra, the country's chief technology officer. It supports the "simpler exchange functions that (providers) need most" while helping standardize existing exchanges, they write jointly on the blog.

Direct Project cribbed notes from the IT sector to get things moving quickly, Blumenthal and Chopra write.

"We set aside the 'top down' approach that's traditional for government," inviting cooperation from competing private IT companies. "Here was the challenge: Give us an easy-to-use tool, with consensus specifications, that will support HIE for the most common clinical information needs -- and deliver a useable result for providers in less than two years."

Having delivered in just 10 months, "these same stakeholders will go out, we hope, and develop competing products based on the very standards they worked together to assemble!"

In Minnesota, the Hennepin County Medical Center is now sending immunization information to the state health department over the Internet, Arien Malec, coordinator of the Direct Project, wrote on the project website. Meanwhile, a provider-to-provider information exchange was formed in Rhode Island.