Report: RHIOs long way from action
Healthcare IT News
By Fred Bazzoli, Senior Editor 03/13/06
Organizers of regional health information organizations continue to lay the groundwork for data exchange, but there are only a handful of initiatives that are operational.
While hundreds of RHIOs are in the talking stage, most are still sorting out governance.
It will be some time before they begin exchanging data, contends a new report, issued last week by Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass.
The research organization counts only seven RHIOs in operation today, and those vary widely in architecture and governance, said Eric Brown, vice president of healthcare and life sciences.
While a torrent of talk has surrounded the RHIO movement nationwide, Brown is predicting that many of the initiatives now in the discussion phase will be implemented more slowly than many expect.
“We’re clearly in a time where there’s experimentation and learning,” Brown said. “People are building things, and different regions are taking different approaches.”
The seven RHIOs included in the report – HealthBridge in Cincinnati, Indiana Health Information Exchange, Michiana Health Information Network, Northwest RHIO, Philadelphia Health Information Exchange, SAFE Health in Massachusetts and Taconic Health Information Network and Community – all take a variety of approaches to governance and financing.
The effort to study successful RHIOs for generalizable lessons, announced in February by David Brailer, MD, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare IT, could help the initiatives from moving off into the “chaos” of too many different directions, Brown said.
“That’s been (Brailer’s) strategy,” Brown said. “It’s not his intention to let a thousand wild flowers bloom and see what happens. There’s a role for some directional influence by his office, but many people in the industry are looking for a little bit more influence. We have a lot to learn before we agree on the future architecture of a national network.”
But he fears the RHIOs will take long to implement and could lose momentum by trying to achieve too much for starters.
“Getting to the ideal end-state has huge value, but huge cost and huge transformational inertia,” he said. By contrast, many of the operational RHIOs have implemented services gradually, starting with more easily achieveable projects that can quickly return some results.
