Wikipedia defines a health information exchange (HIE) as the mobilization of healthcare information electronically across organizations within a region, community or hospital system.

The emergence of HIEs is widely expected to provide a range of important benefits for patients, physicians, and the healthcare industry as a whole.The HIE provides the capability to electronically move clinical information among disparate health care information systems while at the same time maintaining the meaning of the information being exchanged. The goal of the HIE is to facilitate access to and retrieval of clinical data to provide safer and more timely, efficient, effective, and equitable patient-centered care.

Come and learn more about this important component to our healthcare future!

Announcing the second in  a series of three webinars hosted by NER’s Health-IT Community of Interest:  

Health-IT 

Community of Interest   

“Understanding the Role of HIEs”

with
Jeff Loughlin, Director of the NH-REC

 Wednesday, March 7th from 3:00-4:00 pm  

TO REGISTER:     http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HIT-COI

Login information will be provided at registration.  

 For additional questions, contact: Mark Goldstein (mark.goldstein@umassmed.edu; 508-856-5964).

Session I: “Understanding the role of RECs”, Wed, Jan 25, 2-3 pm

As key speaker for next Wednesday’s webinar we have Jeff Loughlin, who serves as the Director for the Regional Extension Center of New Hampshire. He also serves as a Project Director with the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, working with providers, practice leaders, medical and administrative staffs to ensure successful adoption and “meaningful use” of EHR technology in the medical office environment.

RECs (Regional Extension Centers) are authorized by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This was signed into law on February 17, 2009, to promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology.

RECs were established to support and serve primary care clinicians and other health care providers, helping them to quickly become adept and meaningful users of electronic health records (EHRs).

To register for this webinar: click here

To join the HIT-COI group and receive future mailings: click here
Also, please stay tuned for announcements on future sessions in this exciting series:

Session II: Understanding the Role of HIEs (Health Information Exchanges)
To be announced (early-to-mid Feb)

Session III: Understanding the Role of Community Colleges in HIT
To be announced (mid-to-late Feb)

The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) has enhanced the Drug Naming Standard for Electronic Health Records. The RxNorm standard clinical drug vocabulary produced by the NLM is now said to contain more accurate and complete connections between National Drug Codes (NDCs) and standard non-proprietary names of medications recommended for use in electronic health records (EHRs). NLM, a component of the National Institutes of Health, claims to be the world’s largest medical library. Read more

On Wednesday, October 12, the National Library of Medicine will enhance the MedlinePlus Connect Web service response for problem/diagnosis codes by adding selected links to related information for patients. The Web service response for problem/diagnosis codes already returns the health topic name, URL, synonyms, summary, and summary attribution. This enhancement will expand the information in the response to include supplemental links related to the specific health topics provided in the response. These are the same links that MedlinePlus Connect already provides on the Web application response page, beneath the abbreviated health topic summary in bulleted list format. You can see an example of these links on the Web application response page for ICD-9-CM code 493.22.

This enhancement only affects the Web service response for problem/diagnosis codes (ICD-9-CM, SNOMED-CT). There will be no changes to the Web application response and no changes to the Web service response for lab tests or medications.

Special Instructions for Current Users of the MedlinePlus Connect Web Service:

In the Web service response XML, the new links will appear in the