RD252 - Report: Health Information Technology Advisory Commission


Executive Summary:
Virginia’s Statewide Health Information Exchange (SHIE) is a collaborative endeavor, involving public and private stakeholders from across the Commonwealth.

SHIE’s Vision:

That consumers and providers of health services are empowered to make good decisions based on secure, timely, accurate, comprehensive and easily-accessible information, available to authorized users for coordination of care, improvements in safety and quality, and advancements in the provision of healthcare.

SHIE’s Mission:

To foster and sustain trust, collaboration and information-sharing among consumers, providers and purchasers of healthcare services in the Commonwealth of Virginia, leading to measurable improvement in outcomes and cost-effective delivery of services.

Strategic Plan

The Commonwealth of Virginia’s overall strategy for developing and increasing adoption of health information exchange within and outside its borders relies on several principles:

1. Building upon existing private sector and public sector efforts with a minimal amount of duplicative effort both from a manpower and technology perspective.

2. Coordinating project timelines for health information technology related projects across all Commonwealth state agencies and pooling resources and implementation approaches whenever applicable.

3. Utilizing a combination of approaches (grassroots and top-down) across the stakeholder landscape to solicit input and outcomes information for continuous improvement of health information exchange policies and procedures over the course of the implementation.

HITAC has made the following recommendation as to the overall strategic implementation approach for the SHIE:

Allow any HIE that meets the HIE certification requirements to compete in a free market across the Commonwealth, supplying their exchange services to any interested healthcare provider.

• This model includes an approach of “HIE certification” based on a set of HIE requirements.

• An HIE must first go through a certification process where their compliance with the SHIE standards are tested and verified, and then upon successful certification they will be authorized to operate as a SHIE certified HIE on the SHIE.

• These SHIE certified HIEs do not need to be HIEs in the traditional sense (such as CareSpark, MedVirginia and NOVARHIO), but could also be other entities, such as Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs).

• Commonwealth state agencies that handle health-related data or healthcare delivery are also expected to participate.

• Any healthcare data provider that wishes to interoperate directly at the state level could be SHIE certified and authorized to be an HIE on the SHIE.