Free Health Information Exchange – HIE

One of my readers pointed out that NaviNet was offering their Health Information Exchange (HIE) solution to state governments for free. Here’s a short part of the press release:

NaviNet (formerly NaviMedix), America’s largest real-time healthcare communications network, today announced the NaviNet Health Information Exchange (HIE), a solution that combines the NaviNet Provider Network of more than 770,000 providers nationwide, and NaviNet technology and services. The NaviNet HIE is now available to all state governments and U.S. territories at no cost, enabling more efficient implementation and expansion of local health data exchange. Adoption of NaviNet HIE minimizes technology investment requirements, providing states and territories a rapid and cost-effective way to offer their own branded health information exchange to electronically connect physicians, hospitals, insurers and existing HIEs in their regions. NaviNet is already used by two out of every three U.S. healthcare providers, and leading national, commercial and Blues health plans, resulting in significant costs savings to the industry.

I always find it interesting when someone starts offering something for free. I always have to ask myself the question of why they would offer it for free. I don’t know NaviNet that well, but it seems like this free offering is 2 fold. First, it seems like they probably want to sell the HIE to people other than government. Second, I think that they probably want participants in the HIE to also use NaviNet’s billing services.

What’s really interesting to me also is that it seems like NaviNet is basically a billing company (although, I don’t know them that well). I find this really interesting since I’ve often seen the argument that we’ve been exchanging billing information electronically in healthcare for a while. Since this is the case, many people have wondered why we couldn’t also exchange other healthcare information. Is this offering from NaviNet, the realization of this principle?

Free EMR has been going well for a while. We’ll see how Free HIE goes.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • This is a classic example of getting to a standard quickly by making it free. TCP/IP became the global networking standard because it was free! Give the razor for free and make money on the blades. I bet that this company has a whole bunch of blades in the form of services, consulting and a captive clientele that gets it for free. The “Freemium” model in Healthcare IT, I guess!

  • STANDARDS:

    NIEM ( http://www.niem.gov/index.php ), the National Information Exchange Model is designed to develop, disseminate and support enterprise-wide information exchange standards across government agencies throughout the nation.

    Currently the following domains use NIEM standards to exchange information.

    • Department of Homeland Security, including Federal, State and Local Law enforcement agencies
    • Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN)
    • Emergency Management
    • Immigration
    • Infrastructure Protection
    • Intelligence
    • International Trade
    • Justice
    • Maritime
    • Screening
    • (Youth and) Family Services
    • Healthcare: (???) I have heard (not verifed) that US Military Hospitals including the VA exchange patient information using NIEM. Patient records are available even in combat zones.

    Why not EMRs consider NIEM as an exchange vehicle?

  • 750,000 providers that is almost everyone and it is the first time I have heard of these guys???? It appears they are a credit card processing or similar company, maybe. So yea it is possible they have a network that connects to every doctor but that is a far cry from exchanging health information other than name, DOB, SSN and credit card!
    Looks like they want to get in on all the social assistance being handed out.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories