Pennsylvania Signs Agreement to Connect HIEs

The Pennsylvania eHealth Partnership Authority, an independent state agency that aims to enable health information exchange (HIE), recently announced that it will integrate and share healthcare data from 11 different regional and statewide HIEs across the state. The platform, from the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Truven Health Analytics, will connect patient data from various providers, health plans, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The statewide community shared services platform (CSS), as Truven calls it, will use the Truven Health HIE solution to exchange health information among participants. The CSS will support the creation of participant directories through a single interface. The end result will provide clinicians within Pennsylvania's 11 regional and statewide HIEs with patient histories at the point-of-care, Truven says.

The agreement is for five years and according to various media reports is for $8.9 million. This is not the first state to work with Truven in this area. West Virginia is among those that are using the company, which was formerly the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters, to allow providers to share data.