The Office of the Coordinator for Health IT is planning to use a long-established information exchange model that enables data sharing between the Department of Justice and Homeland Security agencies as a testbed for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).
ONC plans to use the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), which "has been used successfully in government," by adding a healthcare domain to it, said John Halamka, chief information officer of Harvard Medical School and co-chairman of the federal Health IT Standards Committee, at a Feb. 24 meeting of the panel.
NIEM, a partnership of Justice and the DHS, is a framework for developing information exchange standards which describe content and processes among organizations that share data as part of their daily business operations.
It uses the Global Justice XML Data Model, a reference model and language for the exchange of information within the justice and public safety communities.
To support the effort ONC asked for bids from vendors who could help create a standards and an interoperability "factory" that would develop consistent information exchange definitions that can be used to test the NHIN.
The bid request was published Feb. 18 on the FedBizOpps Web site.
The winning bidder will build on existing exchange work and further develop NHIN specifications and test use cases using a platform-independent model, the announcement said.
HHS anticipates the two-year work order for the NHIN interoperability specifications factory to start in March.
In a separate move, ONC said it is looking for vendors to take over the interoperability standards harmonization work that up to now has been conducted by the Health IT Standards Panel (HITSP), a public-private partnership, whose contract ends in April.
That HITSP replacement contract, to synchronize and unify standards and definitions for interoperability, was also announced on the FedBizOps site Feb. 19.
