The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is unveiling a new online engagement platform meant to facilitate information sharing among state health IT stakeholders.

The platform - http://ciostatenet.org - is part of a broader relaunch for CHIME’s CIO State Network (StateNet) to enhance communication among healthcare chief information officers and other stakeholders on important matters related to the HITECH Act, as well as on other key state health IT activity. The new web-based platform also is designed to enable cross-state communications and provide an environment of easy-to-use, actionable resources to address important health IT issues.

CHIME StateNet was established to ensure that healthcare CIOs were intimately involved with HITECH implementation inside their states. A 50-state (and the District of Columbia) network of health IT stakeholders sought to foster statewide coalitions charged with advancing and standardizing the adoption of health information technology and health information exchange.

As part of its work during this first iteration, CHIME StateNet published “Guiding Principles” for more robust health information exchange (HIE) and better utilized regional extension centers (RECs). Several states have also teamed with local Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) chapters to coordinator state advocacy days to inform public officials on the benefits of health IT.

Since that time, the national health IT landscape has broadened with current horizons focused on a host of issues, including:
• Proposed rules for meaningful use stage 2;
• Expansion and refinement of HIE operations;
• Rollout of REC service utilization for stage 1 meaningful use;
• Development of HIT and HIM workforce capacity; and
• Preparation for broader healthcare quality initiatives, introduced through healthcare reform and the Affordable Care Act.

The engagement platform for StateNet members will facilitate information sharing among state health IT stakeholders; enable cross-state communications where regional or national collaboration is needed; and provide an environment of easy-to-use, actionable resources to address important health IT issues.

CHIME will utilize familiar social networking tools and employ social media to help stakeholders collaborate. In addition to the StateNet-wide functions, such as the StateWatch Blog and the StateNet Discussion Forum, each member of CHIME StateNet will be able to join their State Group. These State Groups will have their own discussion forums that will enable members of that state to communicate via email and through a web-based forum. State pages also have the ability to create an unlimited number of pages that are html-enabled, can imbed video or sound files, and third-party widgets.