The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has been busy with a number of projects to support expansion of EHR adoption and the building of a National Health Information Exchange/System (NHIS). One significant contribution towards this effort has been their CONNECT solution. Among the many challenges of building a robust, usable NHIS is with standardizing EHR systems nationally, not only at the interface level, but also in the data gathered. "Meaningful use" guidelines, discussed in previous blog posts, have provided the standards needed for EHR adoption, but still interoperability and data consistency will remain a significant issue to be addressed. The CONNECT solution is aimed at providing such "standards and services to ensure that health information exchanges are compatible with other exchanges throughout the country."
According to a ONC fact-sheet on CONNECT, "CONNECT was developed by federal agencies to support their health-related missions. It is now available as an open source solution to any organization seeking to establish health information exchanges using nationally-recognized interoperability standards."
By utilizing the CONNECT solution healthcare organization can transmit and receive health records and patient medical information overcoming interoperability issues. "It enhances security, promotes public health, and empowers patients to be more active and involved in their own care decisions."
There are three main pillars to the CONNECT solution:
1. "Core Services Gateway": This component allows healthcare organizations to "request and receive documents associated with the patient, and record these transactions for subsequent auditing..." In addition, it can authenticate network users, and check proper authorization for "release of medical information."
2. "Enterprise Service Components": These provide various critical enterprise components that support health information exchange, "including a Master Patient Index,... Authorization Policy Engine,... HIPPA-compliant Audit Log", etc.
3. "Universal client Framework" which includes a "set of applications that can be updated to quickly create an edge system, and be used as a reference system, and/or can be used as a test and demonstration system for the gateway solution."
With CONNECT being open source further development and enhancement of this tool can help make Health Information Exchanges function seamlessly across various platform, leading to better knowledge of diseases and treatments and improvements to quality of patient care.
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