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Development Work Marches on for Open Source HIE Solution, Officials Say Through efforts spearheaded by ONC’s Standards and Interoperability Office, government officials are making headway on CONNECT, an open source software solution meant to support local and national health information exchange. CONNECT uses Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) standards and governance to make sure that HIEs are compatible with other exchanges standing up across the country. On June 11, 2011, the first full release of CONNECT version 3.2 under new development teams was made generally available (GA). Since that time, CONNECT developers held a Code-a-Thon at Johns Hopkins to collaborate, discuss ideas and share best practices on how CONNECT should move forward. This week, CONNECT released version 3.2.1, which developers said was “essentially a bug release.” Some examples of the fixes built into 3.2.1 include correlating multiple responses for patient discovery and more robust policy checks inside the gateway when requesting patient data. ONC officials hope to release a more comprehensive release, CONNECT 3.3, sometime this winter.
CMS Actuary Outlines How HHS Can Get To $10B with Partnership for Patients At the behest of Senators Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were urged to pinpoint how HHS could save $10 billion over three years through the Partnership for Patients. CMS Chief Actuary Rick Foster delivered an answer this week, but he cautioned that it would be difficult to assess savings and scale best-practices industry-wide, as envisioned in the Partnership. According to HHS, the Partnership for Patients seeks to decrease preventable errors by 40 percent and reduce readmission rates by 20 percent by 2013. Mr. Foster said that reaching the $10 billion goal would be difficult to achieve, but possible – and that such efforts hold significant potential to improve patient care and save money. According to the actuary’s letter, “Considerable evidence suggests that these goals are indeed possible, but we reiterate that achieving consistent improvement across all providers and patient populations will be very challenging, particularly if it must be done primarily through voluntary efforts.” Another issue that makes estimating savings difficult is determining how much could be saved through reduced follow-up visits or added administrative burdens associated with the program.
