Health Care Progress

In November, the Department of Health and Human Services took a major step toward a national health-information network, awarding contracts totaling $18.6 million to four separate consortia that were made up of health-care organizations and IT companies. The four consortia will be led by Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp., IBM and Northrop Grumman.

Each consortium will design and implement a standards-based network prototype eventually to be placed in the public domain that will test patient identification, access control and other security protections and specialized network functions, and test the feasibility of large-scale deployment. Most important, all four consortia will ensure that information can move seamlessly between the four networks, establishing a single infrastructure.

Three other contracts, totaling $17.5 million, were also recently awarded to nonprofit organizations to promote the adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHRs).

• The American National Standards Institute will organize the development, prototyping and evaluation of a process to achieve an acceptable set of health IT standards supporting interoperability;
• The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology will develop criteria and evaluation processes for certifying EHRs and the related network components;
• The Association of Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration will work with states or territorial governments to develop plans that will address variations in business policies and laws affecting privacy and security practices.