The top two managers of the Connect exchange gateway are leaving the pioneering federal health information exchange (HIE) program as it sets new directions to advance the adoption of health information exchange for meaningful use.
Dave Riley, an independent consultant who is the Connect program's lead technical manager, and Vanessa Manchester, an independent consultant who is Connect's program manager, will be leaving by the beginning of December, according to a federal agency adviser. Both have helped shepherd the Connect exchange development community since 2007.
The program is under a stop-work order from the Government Accountability Office because a new Connect development contract, which was awarded in September to CGI, was protested by the incumbent contractor Harris. GAO is examining the contract award process and is expected to allow work to proceed at the end of the year.
The Office of the National Coordinator's Federal Health Architecture (FHA) community of 26 health agencies has developed increasingly sophisticated versions of Connect's software tools and standards, which facilitate health information sharing among federal and commercial healthcare organizations.
Connect software enables an organization to set up an HIE within an organization or tie an HIE into a regional network using standards of the nationwide health information network. The current version of the software includes specifications for NHIN Direct, a streamlined version of the NHIN standards and services, designed to help physicians and small practices share basic electronic health records, Riley said recently. Efforts to reach him on Nov. 19 were unsuccessful.
With NHIN Direct tools integrated with Connect, ONC plans a closer relationship with the Connect program to make it more scalable and easier to deploy, according to the adviser.
In a recent interview with Government Health IT, Doug Fridsma, MD, ONC's director of standards and interoperability, said ONC would like to put NHIN Direct services in a place that is easy to find for providers who need to exchange information directly with another provider.
