Leading Health Care and Information Technology Groups Endorse Common Framework for Health Information Exchange to Support Improvements in Health and Healthcare

Thirteen Groups Collaborate in Responding to Federal Government's RFI on National Health Information Network

January 18, 2005 (New York, NY and Washington, DC)

About the Thirteen Collaborating Organizations

About AHIMA - The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) is the national association of health information management (HIM) professionals. AHIMA's 50,000 members are dedicated to the effective management of personal health information needed to deliver quality healthcare to the public. Founded in 1928 to improve the quality of medical records, AHIMA is committed to advancing the HIM profession in an increasingly electronic and global environment through leadership in advocacy, education, certification, and lifelong learning. www.ahima.org

About AMIA - The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is an organization of leaders shaping the future of health information technology in the United States and abroad. AMIA is dedicated to the development and application of medical informatics in support of patient care, teaching, research, and health care administration. AMIA's members represent all basic, applied, and clinical interests in health care information technology. www.amia.org

About ANSI/HISB - The American National Standards Institute's Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (ANSI HISB) provides an open, public forum for the voluntary coordination of healthcare informatics standards among all United States standard developing organizations. Every major developer of healthcare informatics standards in the United States participates in ANSI HISB. The ANSI HISB has 27 voting members and more than 100 participants, including ANSI-accredited and other standards developing organizations, professional societies, trade associations, private companies, federal agencies and others. www.ansi.org

About CITL - The Center for Information Technology Leadership in Wellesley, MA is a not-for-profit research organization established in 2002. Using a rigorous, analytic approach, CITL assesses clinical information technologies and disseminates its findings to help provider organizations maximize the value of their IT investments, help technology firms understand how to improve the value proposition of their healthcare products, and inform national healthcare IT policy discussions. Chartered by Partners HealthCare, which was founded in 1994 by Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, CITL is directed by an Executive Committee, supported by a strategic alliance with HIMSS, and assisted by teams of experts in healthcare delivery, business, and informatics. www.citl.org

About Connecting for Health - Connecting for Health, which was conceived and operated by the Markle Foundation and receives additional support from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is committed to accelerating actions on a national basis to tackle the technical, financial and policy challenges of bringing healthcare into the information age. Connecting for Health has demonstrated that blending together the knowledge and experience of the public and private sectors can provide a formula for progress, not paralysis. Early in its inception, Connecting for Health convened a remarkable group of government, industry and healthcare leaders that led the national debate on electronic clinical data standards. The group also drove consensus on the adoption of an initial set of standards, developed case studies on privacy and security and helped define the electronic personal health record. In July 2004, Connecting for Health released a timely report that details specific actions the public and private sectors can take to accelerate the adoption of information technology in healthcare. Connecting for Health's Preliminary Roadmap for Achieving Electronic Connectivity in Healthcare calls for all stakeholders from across the healthcare industry to work together to build a health information infrastructure that would improve patient care, reduce medical error and lower costs while protecting patient privacy. www.connectingforhealth.org

About eHealth Initiative - eHealth Initiative and its Foundation are independent, non-profit affiliated organizations whose missions are the same: to drive improvement in the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare through information and information technology. Through eHealth Initiative's consortium of practicing clinicians, employers and healthcare purchasers, health information organizations, health plans, healthcare information technology vendors, hospitals and other healthcare providers, manufacturers, patient and consumer organizations, and public health agencies and eHealth Initiative Foundation's various programs and initiatives, both engage the multiple and diverse stakeholders in healthcare to achieve consensus on and then implement actionable strategies that tackle the technical, financial, organizational, legal and clinical challenges related to the adoption of health information technology and health information exchange to improve health and healthcare. www.ehealthinitiative.org

About HL7 - Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven, Inc. is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited open, consensus-based standards development organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. HL7's more than 2,000 members from approximately 500 public and private organizations, including 90 percent of the largest information systems vendors serving healthcare, bring the full spectrum of healthcare and IT domain knowledge to standards development. www.HL7.org

About HIMSS - HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) is the healthcare industry's membership organization exclusively focused on providing leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology and management systems for the betterment of human health. Founded in 1961 with offices in Chicago, Washington D.C., and other locations across the country, HIMSS represents more than 14,000 individual members and some 220 member corporations that employ more than 1 million people. HIMSS frames and leads healthcare public policy and industry practices through its advocacy, educational and professional development initiatives to promote information and management systems' contributions to ensuring quality patient care. www.himss.org

About the HIMSS EHRs Vendor Association - The EHR Vendor Association is comprised of companies that develop and sell electronic health record systems and have voluntarily elected to form a trade association in order to accelerate EHR adoption. The primary mission of the association is to provide a forum for the EHR vendor community relative to standards development, the proposed EHR certification process, interoperability, performance and quality measures, and other EHR issues that may become the subject of increasing government oversight, as well as clinician association initiatives and requests. www.himssehrva.org

About Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) - IHE is an initiative undertaken by medical specialists and other care providers, administrators, information technology professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE has effectively promoted the coordinated use of established communications standards such as HL7, ISO, DICOM, W3C, and IETF to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care. It has for the past six years established a proven standards adoption process that resulted in the detailed specification of a framework of 27 Integration Profiles, publicly available interoperability solutions to a number of healthcare information exchange problems. These detailed and exhaustive standards-based specifications have been adopted by more than 100 healthcare vendors world-wide, among which most of the leading large and small technology vendors that sustain the US healthcare IT system. They have voluntarily cooperated with the provider professional associations and submitted their implementations to the IHE Connectathon testing process. As a consequence of this cooperation, providers have experienced that systems developed in accordance with IHE communicate with one another more effectively, are easier to deploy, and enable care providers to use information more readily. www.ihe.net

About Internet2 - Led by more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia, industry, and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to create a leading edge network capability for the national research and education community; to enable revolutionary Internet applications; and to ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community. In doing so, Internet2 supports innovations in networking that assist organizations, including those in the health sciences, to enhance their activities; expand their technological capabilities; refine their security and applications; and redefine the parameters of disease diagnosis, treatment, and management. www.internet2.edu

About the Liberty Alliance - Liberty Alliance is an alliance of more than 150 companies, non-profit and government organizations from around the globe. The consortium is committed to developing an open standard for federated network identity that supports all current and emerging network devices. Federated identity offers businesses, governments, employees and consumers a more convenient and secure way to control identity information in today's digital economy, and is a key component in driving the use of e-commerce, personalized data services, as well as Web-based services. Membership is open to all commercial and non-commercial organizations. The 2005 Board is comprised of the following sixteen companies: American Express, AOL, Ericsson, Fidelity Investments, France Telecom, General Motors, HP, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Novell, Oracle, RSA Security, Sun Microsystems, VeriSign, and Vodafone Group. www.projectliberty.org

About the Alliance - The National Alliance for Health Information Technology is a diverse partnership of leaders from all healthcare sectors working to advance the adoption and implementation of healthcare information technology to achieve measurable improvements in patient safety, quality of care and operating performance. The Alliance works with healthcare and government leaders to help shape the policy environment and accelerate the implementation of world-class, standards-based information technology aimed at creating the most effective, safe, unified, and inclusive health system possible. Since its founding in 2002, the Chicago-based Alliance has helped forge consensus and advance progress on such important initiatives as barcodes and electronic health records. www.nahit.org

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Comments from Collaborating Organization Participants

National Health Information Environment Summary: A Collaborative Approach