NAPLES,
FL – December 18, 2008 – HIPAAT
Inc. (HIPAAT), the leading provider of consent management
solutions to the healthcare industry, partnered with IBM in
this week's successful North Carolina Healthcare Information
and Communications Alliance, Inc. (NCHICA)
and MedVirginia demonstrations
of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN)
Trial Implementations. The Washington, DC presentations
highlighted the importance of consumer
empowerment and patient privacy.
HIPAAT’s SOA-based consent engine, Privacy eSuite,
provides consent management services to enable authorized
healthcare providers and patients to securely and privately
exchange medical records. The consent engine was an integral
component of IBM’s Health
Information Service Provider (HSP) solution for the demonstration.
Privacy eSuite allows patients
to establish their own consent directives. It then determines
if a given healthcare provider is authorized
to access the patients’ personal health information
(PHI), based on those directives. Once authorized, the physician
has straightforward access to requested PHI through the secure
nationwide network of health information.
The IBM HSP provided the supporting architecture and operations
to power the cross-organizational services for two of the
nine demonstrating NHIN Health Information Exchange (HIE)
contractors: NCHICA and
MedVirginia.
NCHICA and MedVirginia, under contract to the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS)
and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information
Technology (ONC),
have spent the past fifteen months propelling the goal of
a “network of networks.” The final deliverable
to HHS/ONC was a live national demonstration of privacy-sensitive
access control
and information exchange across all nine HIEs through a series
of seven use cases.
NCHICA demonstrated the Consumer Access to Clinical Information
(CACI) use case. In the demo, “Susan Clark” was
a prototypical patient with medical records spread among
various private and governmental providers. Susan selected
and populated a Personal Health Record (PHR) with her own
PHI, which she imported through the NHIN from her physicians
and other providers. She then chose what portion of her
health records she wanted to share by role (e.g., physician,
nurse, administrator), by named physician, or even by document
type. Susan recorded her consent preferences in her PHR,
which in turn stored the directives in Privacy eSuite through
IBM’s
HSP. Selected PHI was available to authorized users of the
North Carolina HIE and the NHIN through the IBM HSP.
“We’ve been very proud to participate with IBM
in the NCHICA and MedVirginia NHIN
efforts,” said Terry Callahan, HIPAAT Managing Director. “The
pilot test demonstrated the technology is there to enable
patient-centric privacy in nationwide health information
exchange. When patients are confident in the privacy and
security of their PHI, they are more likely to participate
in health data exchange and give accurate information to
their providers. The result is a greater amount of reliable
PHI, which leads to fewer medical errors, increased patient
safety and higher quality of care.” |
