A group of health information exchange (HIE) organizations is forming the Consortium for State and Regional Interoperability (CSRI), citing the vision to see individual and population health improve nationwide through robust electronic health data interoperability.
The founding members of the Consortium for State and Regional Interoperability include:
- CRISP - Maryland, District of Columbia, West Virginia
- Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO) - Colorado
- CyncHealth - Nebraska and Iowa
- Health Current - Arizona
- Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) - Indiana
- Manifest MedEx – California
In a press release announcement, officials noted that these organizations “are all successful nonprofit HIEs with robust technology infrastructure, data stewardship expertise, and far-reaching data networks. They serve as health data utilities for their respective state’s healthcare providers, health plans, Medicaid agencies, and public health departments.”
A health data utility is a public-private resource that provides a source of truth for robust clinical and non-clinical data, which can be leveraged by the state and other healthcare system stakeholders to achieve healthier communities, they added.
CSRI is intent on building solutions that deliver vital data to the agencies and organizations that need it most. The core mission of CSRI is to strengthen the nation’s data exchange capabilities by:
1. Developing solutions that providers, health plans, Medicaid programs, and public health departments can use across state lines and federal initiatives;
2. Advancing initiatives that promote robust and scalable health data exchange nationwide; and
3. Delivering insights for federal agencies to inform critical decisions, relieve administrative burden, and accelerate innovation.
Officials said that collectively, CSRI’s organizations connect over 80 million records for patients across several states and provide a wide range of services to healthcare stakeholders.
Notably, the six founding organizations of CSRI are all members of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC), an existing nonprofit national trade association representing HIEs. SHIEC’s members include more than 81 health information exchanges and their strategic business and technology partners.
In an emailed statement, a CORHIO spokesperson noted that CSRI and SHIEC “are not at cross purposes, but rather in alignment with our overall missions to increase the visibility and support of health information exchange organizations. Our founders are all involved with SHIEC and very supportive of their mission. SHIEC serves to promote advocacy, education and visibility for individual HIEs, where CSRI serves to share infrastructure in order to offer joint services—to federal agencies, for example.”
Recently, two of the group’s founding members, CORHIO and Health Current, announced they would be entering into formal discussions to strategically align their organizations to better serve the healthcare data needs in Colorado and Arizona, while preparing for future consolidation in the HIE landscape, and possibly for becoming a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under the TEFCA framework. By coming together, the two HIEs said they have the potential to create the largest health data utility in the West.
“CSRI is well-positioned to leverage economies of scale on projects that have the potential to move the interoperability needle in a big way,” added Morgan Honea, CORHIO CEO. “I am incredibly excited to be a part of this innovative group and look forward to developing and delivering health IT that can help solve significant data problems.”
