HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has announced that the department will support trial implementations for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).

“The trial implementations are a critical next step to move America closer to realizing an interoperable Nationwide Health Information Network,” said Interim National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Dr. Robert Kolodner. “By bringing together the significant expertise and work achieved this year by the current efforts with state and local health information exchanges, we can begin to construct the ‘network of networks’ that will form the basis of the Nationwide Health Information Network.”

Trial implementations of the NHIN are a key step toward meeting the President’s vision of using information technology to make patient information available to providers and consumers, regardless of geographic location. In the coming months, HHS will announce details of the procurement process for the trial implementations. Proposals to create the trial implementations and work toward integrating them with the broader NHIN initiative will be solicited in spring 2007.

This last year’s NHIN activities included “prototype architectures” developed by four consortia of health care and health information technology organizations through contracts with HHS. This “prototype architecture” work included developing functional requirements, security approaches and identifying needed standards for creating secure health information exchange in different health care markets.

In January 2007, the four existing consortia will present the prototype architectures at the American Health Information Community and the third NHIN forum to be held in Washington, D.C. A summary report capturing key findings from this past year will be published in early 2007.

More information about HHS’ health information technology initiative is available at http://www.hhs.gov/healthit.

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