NHIT achieves milestone with NHIN CONNECTfx gateway software

NHITOct 5 2009

Nationwide Health Information Technology, Inc. (NHIT) today announced the milestone of 4,000 production transactions processed through the NHIN using CONNECTfx based on the U.S. Government's open-source CONNECT solution.

CONNECTfx was developed to facilitate adoption of the NHIN initiative among NHIEs, HIEs, and other collaborative healthcare organizations by providing pre-certified gateway environments, open-source EHR adapter components, secure hosting, and technical services.

As the first private-sector CONNECT-based deployment on the NHIN, CONNECTfx facilitates the secure delivery of electronic health record requests to the Social Security Administration for the purpose of disability determinations.

According to James Borland, SSA special advisor for health IT, SSA wants to build on its successful track record. "We would like to expand those benefits to more healthcare providers, to more of our disability determination services in more states. The bottom line is we want to expand the benefits of quicker disability decisions to more of our claimants," he said.

With a well-documented production blueprint now in place for NHIN participation, NHIT has provided qualified organizations with the resources required to respond to the SSA opportunity.

As announced earlier this year, SSA expects to award contracts to information exchanges, regional health information organizations, general medical and specialty care providers or organizations representing them with funds authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act based upon successful SSA RFP submissions which were due by Friday, 9/18/09.

"We have found that the majority of healthcare organizations who share the common mission of providing quality services across entire populations require connectivity-enabling solutions such as EMPI, Entity Identifier Management and Document Registries," said Colin P. Barry, NHIT Chief Technology Officer. "From a technical perspective, we are repeatedly being asked for a deeper feature set and a host of tools and services to ensure that these critical objectives can be realized."

Mr. Barry was invited to personally demonstrate the use of the NHIN gateway using the CONNECTfx toolkit along with the SSA technical team before members of Congress as part of National Health IT Week on Thursday, 9/24/09.