New Mexico says it is the first state to meet all the criteria of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology for strategic and operational planning for health information exchange and gain approval to receive federal implementation funding. The ONC approval means that the not-for-profit New Mexico Health Information Collaborative can receive a previously announced $7 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and move into the implementation phase of its HIE plan.

NMHIC has a master patient index on more than 1 million unique patients, providing electronic access to records from 10 hospitals, two large physician groups, two major laboratory companies and an ambulance service in Albuquerque, according to the collaborative. The new funding will allow the MPI to grow to include virtually all 2 million residents of New Mexico by 2013. The first phase of expansion will start this month.

NMHIC began in 2004 as a way for Lovelace Clinic to reach a rural population in Taos. To secure the federal funding, Gov. Bill Richardson set up a statewide commission on health IT and telehealth and contracted to make the private-sector collaborative a statewide network, Maggie Gunter, president of LCF Research, which operates NMHIC, told FierceHealthIT last year in a previously unpublished interview. The network is just coming into "production" this year, CIO Dave Perry said in the same interview.

For more information:
- view this press release from the New Mexico Health Information Collaborative
- read the NMHIC's strategic and operational plan (.pdf)
- see this Healthcare IT News brief

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