Great Lakes HIE Receives Full Accreditation From EHNAC

The East Lansing, Mich.-based Great Lakes Health Information Exchange (GLHIE) has received full accreditation for excellence in health data processing and transactions, as well as meeting industry-established standards and HIPAA regulations, under a program from the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC).

Through the consultative review process, EHNAC evaluated GLHIE in areas of privacy and security, technical performance, business practices, and organizational resources as it relates to HIE policies and procedures. In addition, EHNAC reviewed the organization's process of managing and transferring protected health information and determined that the organization meets or exceeds all EHNAC criteria and industry standards.

This secure exchange of information through GLHIE supports coordination of care with primary care physicians, specialists, hospitals, nursing homes and urgent care centers in real-time.

The program under EHNAC—the Health Information Exchange Accreditation Program (HIEAP) — assesses health information and oversight for meeting healthcare reform and privacy and security regulations.

"With the broad adoption of EHRs (electronic health records) and health information technology across the industry, the amount of organizations exchanging protected health information (PHI) and data electronically brings a clear need to ensure all organizations touching this data have the utmost privacy, security and safeguard procedures in place," Lee Barrett, executive director of EHNAC, said in a statement. "With its EHNAC HIEAP designation, customers and business partners can have confidence and trust that GLHIE has met a high standard for privacy and security as it relates to consent, authorization, authentication, access and audit procedures."

GLHIE recently agreed to electronically connect to Michigan Health Connect, the state’s largest HIE serving 82 hospitals and 2,000 medical offices across multiple sections of the state.