A Decade of Progress on Interoperability

The ONC is responsible for the certification program for health information technology, which is required to be eligible for a payment or to avoid a penalty. As part of HITECH the ONC also oversaw the $564 million State Health Information Exchange (HIE) Cooperative Agreement Program. "Long-term financial sustainability for organizations facilitating health information exchange appears to be the most pressing challenge. The fact that three-quarters of efforts cite developing a sustainable business model as a major barrier is a warning to policy makers that the growth in health information exchange will likely falter unless these efforts become self-sustaining or there is a long-term public commitment to their financing." To address many of the concerns on building out a national infrastructure for health information exchange in 2012 the ONC announced its plan for enforcing Conditions of Trusted Exchange (CTE) and Network Validated Entities (NVE). Using our Medicity iNexx software we were able to quickly set up a Health Information Service Provider (HISP) in order to enable Direct secure messaging between provider organizations.