Healtheway HIE Announces Founding Members

Operating as a non-profit, public-private partnership, Healtheway supports the eHealth Exchange, a health information exchange, serving thousands of providers and millions of patients. Its founding members include health systems, technology vendors, and the American Medical Association.

Healtheway, Inc. the non-profit, public-private partnership that operationally supports the eHealth Exchange (formerly known as the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange) Wednesday announced its nine founding organizations. Among them is Epic Systems Inc., the dominant supplier of electronic health record software to hospitals.

The organizations will supplement the involvement of the federal government that has coalesced around the eHealth Exchange. Healtheway's nine founding members are:

• The American Medical Association
• Epic Systems Corp.
• ICA, maker of the CareAlign interoperability and informatics software platform
• Kaiser Permanente
• MedVirginia, the first HIE to go live on the eHealth Exchange
• Mirth Corporation, which powers private HIEs
• The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC)
• Orion Health, another HIE technology developer
• The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI)

The founding members' activities are meant to supplement the work of the Healtheway board of directors. Founding members will be charged with exploring new health IT opportunities and providing recommendations to the board regarding issues that would be of value to the full Healtheway community. 

"Today's announcement reinforces our commitment to establishing a secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange network that is capable of overcoming many of the challenging issues facing health information exchange today," said Michael Matthews, Healtheway Board Chair and founding member, and CEO of MedVirginia.

"The founding members each come at health information exchange from a different perspective, and it's that unique perspective we will rely on. We must continue building an exchange that can meet the needs of organizations large and small, in a wide variety of clinical and technical environments." 

As part of its charter in operationally supporting the eHealth Exchange, Healtheway is working to expand membership and participation in the eHealth Exchange. Originally formed as the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange program in 2007 by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the eHealth Exchange has since transitioned into a public/private partnership. Today the community includes thousands of providers and millions of patients. 

Some organizations on the board, including Kaiser Permanente and MedVirginia, have been involved with the eHealth Exchange since its ONC days, Yeager said. Others are newly working with Healtheway, explained Mariann Yeager, executive director of Healtheway, Inc.

The announcement lays the groundwork for members to participate in Healtheway annual member meetings and to vote on formal governance matters that will come before the organization, she said.

Addressing Epic's participation, Yeager noted that the company has been "integrally involved" in Healtheway's work for several years, and is active in a number of eHealth Exchange workgroups.

"For us, it wasn't a surprise, because they've been there every step of the way, supporting their customers," Yeager said. eHealth Exchange participants have been sharing data in production for four years, she noted. The number of transactions on the exchange has more than doubled in the past six to nine months, Yeager added.

One example of the exchange's growth occurred when the 40th participant recently joined eHealth Exchange. That single node in the network added 80 hospitals and 19,000 clinical users in a single day, Yeager said.

More than 110 organizations in 29 states are actively engaged in the process of enabling data exchange through Healtheway, Yeager said. Some growth is fueled by collaboration with the Care Connectivity Consortium, five prominent health systems: Kaiser Permanente, Geisinger Health System, GroupHealth Cooperative, Intermountain Healthcare, and Mayo Clinic.

The primary types of data being exchanged today are documents structured in the HITSP C32 format, as well as unstructured documents, Yeager said. Medical documentation supporting CMS' End Stage Renal Disease Program are also being exchanged, as well as dialysis clinic quality CMS reporting data, she added. Formats supporting an eventual migration to the Consolidated CDA document format are also being exchanged.

The CommonWell Alliance and Healtheway have "an open dialogue," Yeager explained. CommonWell, a joint initiative of Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway, and RelayHealth, is developing and planning to demonstrate interoperability among electronic health record systems starting in 2014.

"Anything that the vendor community can do to get providers connected is good, so we certainly recognize the importance of collaborating and working, finding ways to move together," Yeager said.

"Healtheway supports an emerging HIE models task group in which CommonWell participates. When their network is operational, their customers will likely have an interest and a need in exchanging with other health systems and providers around the country, and so if there is more than one network, we should be able to interoperate. It's about making sure we're really trying to maximize connectivity across the country."