Health information networks: A growing trend

Community-based health networks didn't work out the first time, but now they're back and, presumably, bringing better connections than ever.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Sept. 13, 2004.

The desire to improve physician access to information and to increase patient safety, while lowering costs, is fueling a sharp rise in the level of interest and activity among doctors and health systems in creating local health information networks.

Since April, groups of competing health care entities in Worcester, Mass.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Mesa County, Colo.; have launched initiatives to establish community-based networks to exchange clinical health information. Network participants determine what kind of data they make accessible and under what conditions. For example, hospitals make test results, discharge summaries, medication lists, allergy notes, x-ray reports and operative reports accessible to emergency departments and community physicians. Physicians generally don't pay hookup or access fees to participate in the network but do pay for their own computers and Internet service.

Similar projects will be announced in the future, but industry observers say anyone seeking to build health networks must overcome the same obstacles that doomed the wave of community health information networks in the early to mid-1990s.

Most CHINs never moved beyond planning because they carried price tags of tens of millions of dollars, participants had different agendas, projects were driven by vendors or health systems, and the technology was inadequate.

Still, "we will absolutely see more work in this area. How successful it will be remains to be seen," said J. Marc Overhage, MD, senior scientist with the Regenstrief Institute, a medical informatics research organization that manages the Indianapolis Network for Patient Care, which has operated in central Indiana since 1995.