exchange report news from FierceHealthIT

Establishing health information exchanges sounds good on paper, but in practice, it's hard to come up with a solid financial justification for keeping them going. So how do you keep a health information exchange alive? Among the key steps to take is to do a good job of determining what each stakeholder will want from the project--both financially and operationally--according to a Foundation for eHealth Initiative report released last week.

The group's Value and …

Here's a nice example of voluntary collaboration between state governments. A group of states who got federal grants for Medicaid IT improvement have agreed to share their project results with other states, giving the others a leg up on the often-onerous development process. Twenty-seven states got a total of $103.6 million from CMS earlier this year to develop EMRs and related systems. Now about half of those states have begun sharing their work with states that didn't get the grants. …

A statewide health information network is in the works for Mississippi, an effort prompted in part by the state's devastating experience with Hurricane Katrina. Last week, Gov. Haley Barbour (R) issued an executive order creating the Mississippi Health Information Task Force, a group whose goals are to develop an HIT infrastructure for the state and to improve care efficiency and quality. Among other objectives, the HIN would make sure "timely, secure and accessible health information" …