First real RHIO set to debut
There are communitywide data exchanges in places like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Santa Barbara. Most doctors in Winona, MN, use Cerner EHRs, and some of the town's residents have portable personal health records. But this month North Adams, MA, will become the first U.S. municipality to launch a citywide information network that allows all physicians and many nurses to access basic clinical data from office-based EHRs (Boston Globe, Jan. 30, 2007). North Adams is part of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, which is setting up regional health information organizations in three cities with $50 million in funding from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
There are communitywide data exchanges in places like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Santa Barbara. Most doctors in Winona, MN, use Cerner EHRs, and some of the town's residents have portable personal health records. But this month North Adams, MA, will become the first U.S. municipality to launch a citywide information network that allows all physicians and many nurses to access basic clinical data from office-based EHRs (Boston Globe, Jan. 30, 2007). North Adams is part of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, which is setting up regional health information organizations in three cities with $50 million in funding from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, CalRHIO, which includes many health care stakeholders in California, expects to choose a vendor to finance and build a statewide health information exchange by mid-March (Health Data Management, Jan. 30). Among the companies said to be bidding are Accenture, Covisint, Computer Sciences Corp., IBM with Axolotl, McKesson, Medicity, Sun Microsystems, and Wellogic.
