I’ll admit to not being the most expert person on HIE, RHIO, NHIN, and all of the other acronyms associated what really is just creating systems and structures for sharing healthcare data between various doctors and systems. However, I do have some knowledge in the area since I believe all of these things will be important for those using an EMR. So, I was surprised when I’d never heard of HHS’ health connect software.

Here’s a short bit from Government Health IT of the government’s connect software’s latest update:

The Health & Human Services Department (HHS) has updated the government’s Connect software to improve information security and enterprise services for organizations that want to use it to exchange health data, said its senior architect.

Connect is federally developed software that lets agencies and healthcare organizations share health data by using the protocols, agreements and core services that make up the nationwide health information network (NHIN).

HHS is trying to develop improvements in the Connect gateway quickly so it can serve as an early model of the NHIN, executives said yesterday.

“The intent of the plan is that Connect will be a reference implementation of NHIN and provide a mechanism for organizations that are building gateways to have the ability to test against it and to provide for feedback to the NHIN specification group,” said Les Westberg, Connect technical lead in the Federal Health Architecture program and an executive with Agilex.

Is there anyone that knows more about this program that can give us a review of what’s going on. I’d love to hear about how far it’s come, the challenges its overcome and the challenges it still faces.

In fact, if you are someone working on one of the acronyms listed at the top that are trying to provide the all to elusive healthcare data interoperability I’d love to learn more about what’s going on in the comments or through a guest post if you have a lot to say.