The US Department of Health and Human Services has awarded a contract to the North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance Inc. (NCHICA) to implement a trial Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), in an effort to build a 'network of networks' that facilitates health information exchange (HIE).
According to the NCHICA (Research Triangle Park, N.C.), a nonprofit consortium that aims to improve healthcare in North Carolina through health information technology (HIT) initiatives, the trial implementations will be guided by the standards-based prototype architectures for secure information sharing developed by four consortia in the first phase of the NHIN initiative completed in January 2007.
NCHICA says is will participate in an NHIN cooperative with the other awardees to specify the interfaces and transactions necessary for core services and American Health Information Community (AHIC) priority areas/use cases.
