The next version of "˜Connect,' a software gateway that helps agencies and other organizations share health-related information, will offer cloud-computing-based options for standing up health information services, according to leaders of the project.
The next two Connect software releases, scheduled for July and September, will allow healthcare providers, agencies and health information exchanges to tap cloud services to support core Connect features, which include messaging, patient discovery and look-up, according to officials with the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) program office.
Cloud computing takes advantage of the growing availability of raw computing power and computer storage capacity to supply business services to organizations on an as-needed basis.
In offering hooks into cloud computing, the Connect team hopes to make it easier and cheaper for agencies and provider organizations to roll out health information exchange applications, which in turn will free budgets and staff for more critical business pursuits.
The Connect architecture includes a network-facing "gateway of gateways" that lets organizations manage multiple health information exchanges, and an adaptor that maps those services to internal agency systems. Officials hope to have cloud support for both available by September.
"If you have this common gateway service that is available somewhere else, all agencies have to worry about is how to integrate their backend systems into the Connect adaptor," said Vish Sankaran, the FHA's program manager. "And the adaptor can talk to something sitting in the cloud."
In the government arena, that could benefit to agencies which manage multiple programs with overlapping health information exchange requirements, such as state departments of health, Medicaid offices, or food assistance and mental health programs.
"If you look across all these programs you'll see common requirements," said Sankaran. "Take provider management -- everyone will need that. All these different programs can reach out to that particular service. There are going to be unique needs but the common things " you roll it up."
Connect architects believe cloud services will also give healthcare information service providers an opportunity to craft new applications on top of core NHIN services.
"We want to create a level playing field," said Sankaran. "The idea is, "˜don't worry about the pipe' " it's what you can you build on top of it that's compelling and useful in the medical environment."
To that end, the Connect program office plans to hold the next in a series of "code-a-thons" next month at Florida International University in Miami where software coders can collaborate on Connect software improvements.
"Part of our goal is to create this eco-system where you've got a community of vendors out there with different kind of offerings," said Dave Riley, a contractor who is the Connect program lead.
Current Connect features exist for patient discovery services, for instance, that enable a provider to send a query for patient records across an HIE network. Other features support biosurveillance applications that push-out data on designated health events.
Core services supporting these applications will be available via the cloud, Connect officials said. That in turn will provide developers the chance to build more focused apps on top of these services. One example might be a service to locate NHIN-compliant organizations within a 200-mile radius that were certified to share biosurveillance data.
Said Riley: "It allows people who have business ideas and revenue models to build a business around these services and do it in the cloud as opposed to doing it some other way. They get economies of scale."
"We see a future where as more people get experienced with the services that we'll see other products crop up," he added.
For government agencies, Connect officials say there is also a financial advantage of going with cloud: costs can be moved from the capital cost side of the ledger to the operations and maintenance accounts, where budgets are bigger. That makes planning and maintaining the program much more manageable, they said.
Riley said the ultimate beneficiary of cloud-based services will be the practicing clinician. "What they want to do is see patients and not manage IT," he said. "They say, "˜give me something that helps me get my job done so that at the end of the day when the clinic closes I can go home and spend time with family'."
Looking ahead, Riley believes the "next big thing" in health information services is "truly advanced clinical decision support."
"Which is not just popping up a guideline but actually having computable data that triggers alerts, that recommends treatment, that critiques therapy," he said. "It's patient specific; it's risk adjusted; and it understands my level of expertise as a provider."
"We are solving the problem of making info reliably available," he added. "But by doing that, you create another problem of information overload. So the next big problem that we have to solve is making information usefully available."
