RTI Coordinates Assessment of Health Information Exchange Among States
In May 2006, RTI International established the National Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration by announcing the 34 states and U.S. territories who signed agreements to join this project. The project is a national collaboration created to address privacy and security policy questions affecting the exchange of health information.
The project is being managed by RTI in cooperation with the National Governors Association under a contract from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. RTI's project team includes multidisciplinary experts in privacy and security law and in health care management together with state and territorial governments.
The participating states and territories include: Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming and Puerto Rico.
Together, the HISPC team will implement a process to address variations in organization-level business policies and state laws affecting privacy and security practices that may pose challenges to the effective exchange of health information. Enabling health information exchange will improve the quality and accuracy of medical diagnoses, treatments, and prescriptions while reducing health care costs.
The HISPC project is one of four key components of the HHS health information technology plan for achieving nationwide health care data exchange. The other three components are intended to
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Harmonize the health care and technology standards used in health information interchange to address gaps and conflicts in current standards
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Set forth certification criteria for the many electronic health care record products and technologies currently available on the market
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Develop and evaluate prototypes for the network architecture to assess the feasibility of developing a national health information network prototype
Work resulting from each of these projects will be used by HHS to develop and refine the business case for establishing the network.
Additional information is available at the following Web sites as well as at www.rti.org/hispc.
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