NHIN - another acronym that will change your life
I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front lately and I have good reason. A new acronym has appeared, and behind it lies a mechanism that will change the way in which health care in the USA is delivered - NHIN.
By on Jul 30, 2009I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front lately and I have good reason. A new acronym has appeared, and behind it lies a mechanism that will change the way in which health care in the USA is delivered - NHIN.
This stands for Nationwide Healthcare Interconnectivity Network and it is the Government sponsored process by which all Government funded health delivery platforms will share data. Importantly, it is also likely to be the mechanism by which all health providers receive their Government funded reimbursements and stimulus funds. So what? I hear you say.
Well, NHIN is the standardized network for interconnectivity that will allow the entire health system of the USA to talk to itself. Electronic medical records will share data from physician to physician, hospital to physician. This is the mechanism by which personal health records (being mandated in all versions of health reform) will be automatically populated with data from all sources. Health Information Exchanges will have a mechanism for operation outside of their own limited geography, allowing for nationwide data exchange. All this will happen because it is through the NHIN that providers will be paid by the Government - and let's remember that this source of funding represents over half of all health expenditure in the USA. It is also the mechanism by which the Department of Social Security will obtain records for the purpose of processing disability claims (DSS is the biggest user of records in the country).
Everyone using NHIN will have to be HIPPA compliant, and there is a restricted list of approved uses of the NHIN (which currently do not include research), and users must meet a carefully defined set of criteria. The system is being built on an open-source model, which will leave most software vendors looking for different business models, but one key result of the new system will be critical to all of us in forecasting - data. The data will only be in the USA at the start, but other countries are working on (or have) similar systems in place.
My company is currently "up to our noses" in deriving effective mechanisms for working inside this new system - the key is that the analytical tools required to make these data work are quite different from those currently in use (which is why many companies are still having trouble getting claims data to work). We've already got those tools in development and testing and it is a really complicated and complex task.
What with REMS and NHIN, I'm wondering when the research side (currently seen in the caBIG program) will be joining the party - but that's for another day when I get back to the thorny issue of forecasting in oncology.