The New HIE Rules

Thankfully, the fundamental motivation issues that have plagued HIE efforts should soon be things of the past. Meaningful use incentives will ensure that doctors and hospitals will soon be willing to share data with reliable partners, and motivated to work toward generalized healthcare data interchange.

The meaningful use interoperability requirements are trivially simple to achieve in the first year. Only one electronic exchange of health information with one other organization, one time, meets the requirements. But as the requirements for meaningful use advance, doctor’s offices and hospitals will not be able meet the requirements without being fully open to HIE based on the standards that we will discuss in this chapter.