e-Health Initiative Releases Survey of HIE Across the Nation

The multi-stakeholder non-profit eHealth Initiative (eHI) released the results of its 2007 4th Annual Survey of Health Information Exchange at the State, Regional and Community Levels, with a review of 130 community-based efforts designed to improve health and healthcare through the mobilization of health information electronically. The 2007 survey results indicate that at least 125 communities across the U.S. are continuing to bring together multiple stakeholders to focus on the secure exchange of health data to improve health and healthcare for patients. Increasingly, such efforts are involving all stakeholders within the system, including clinicians, community health centers, consumers, employers, health plans, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, public health agencies, and government. Despite difficulties with achieving sustainability, the 2007 survey report indicates that at least 32 health information exchange initiatives across the U.S. have made progress, identifying themselves as "operational" or "transmitting data that is used by stakeholders", as compared to the 26 initiatives which identified themselves as operational in 2006. While one-half of advanced stage, operational initiatives received up-front funding from the federal government, many are now receiving ongoing revenues to support operations from non-governmental sources including hospitals (58%), private payers (46%), physician practices (46%) and laboratories (33%), and three-quarters of such initiatives are no longer dependent on grants to support their sustainability. eHI is working closely with operational initiatives to gain much needed insights regarding a set of near-term business cases for the use of electronic clinical health information to continue to advance both policy and on-the-ground progress in this area. Detailed survey results can be found at http://www.ehealthinitiative.org/2007HIESurvey/