The Office of the National Coordinator awarded $9 million in contracts to Lockheed Martin Corp. to create real-world models of the nationwide health information network (NHIN) in order to demonstrate its features and hasten its use by prospective health care offices.
The IT integrator will set up demonstration Web sites to test NHIN technology and standards as well as the interaction of network components required for secure health information exchange.
"This is the equivalent of taking a new medical therapy out of a controlled clinical trial and assessing the value of that therapy in a real-world setting," said Michael Leff, director of Lockheed's Health Information Management Solutions group in announcing the work on Aug. 25.
ONC will also offer technical support services to help providers and large organizations use NHIN-based services and to make more aspects of using those services more automated.
In other work, Lockheed Martin said it will create new reference implementation or sample software that can be used by other organizations to support the testing and adoption of future NHIN services.
Together, the contracts total $9 million over two years.In past health IT work, Lockheed worked on the Social Security Administration's prototype to share patient data with health information exchange MedVirginia using NHIN.
ONC has lined up other contracts to move the NHIN forward Earlier this month, it awarded about $20 million in NHIN work to Stanley, an IT services provider, to build a standards database with related tools to enable their reuse and to manage the network's testing infrastructure.
Stanley will also supply technical services to organizations preparing to participate in the NHIN, such as supplying digital certificates and managing directories.
