The New York eHealth Collaborative has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Informatics Corporation of American (Nashville, Tenn.) to join the public-private multi-state working group comprised of Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors, Health Information Exchange (HIE) vendors and states. The group is looking to create common standards, and is committed to develop the technical specifications to enable “plug and play” connectivity between EHRs and HIEs.

The group includes federally designated counterparts in California, Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Oregon all representing approximately 30 percent of the U.S. population. The collaboration leverages existing published standards for interoperability from the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC). The goal of this effort is to establish a single set of easily implementable standards that will enable connection and adoption of EHRs and HIEs.

Participants in the workgroup have agreed to develop strategies, requirements, standards and certification criteria to connect EHRs to HIEs to enable the broad adoption of health information among providers. The goal will be the fully operational connection between EHRs and state, regional and integrated delivery network (IDN) HIEs.