National Health Information Network

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The United States Department of Health and Human Services awarded contracts totaling $18.6 million to four groups of health care and health information technology organizations to develop prototypes for a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) architecture. The contracts awarded to these four consortia are hoped to move the nation toward the President's goal of personal electronic health records by creating a uniform architecture for health care information that can follow consumers throughout their lives.

The four consortia are led respectively by Accenture, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), International Business Machines (IBM) and Northrop Grumman. Each consortium is a partnership between technology developers and health care providers in three local health care markets. Each group will develop an architecture and a prototype network for secure information sharing among hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and physicians in the three participating markets. Additionally, all four consortia will work together to ensure that information can move seamlessly between each of the four networks to be developed, thus establishing a single infrastructure among all the consortia for the sharing of electronic health information.

Each of the four consortia will design and implement a standards-based network prototype during the coming year. The prototypes will test patient identification and information locator services; user authentication, access control and other security protections and specialized network functions, as well as test the feasibility of large-scale deployment. The work of the consortia will inform the deliberations of the American Health Information Community (the Community), a new federal advisory committee chaired by Secretary Leavitt, which is charged with providing input to HHS and the industry on how to make health records digital and interoperable.

The consortia will share ideas and information about the architecture and prototypes with each other and with the public in order to accelerate secure and seamless exchange of health information across the nation. Once created, the architecture design for each of the networks will be placed in the public domain to stimulate others to develop further innovative approaches to implementing health information technology.

The NHIN consortia will work closely with other HHS partners, including the Health Information Technology Standards Panel established by the American National Standards Institute, the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, and the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration established by RTI and the National Governor’s Association.

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