[1] RHIO stakeholders include smaller clinics, hospitals, medical societies, major employers and payers.
In contrast with other developed nations, healthcare accounts for a disproportionate percentage of the US GDP, and there is a concern about the economic viability of Medicare.
[4] While numerous possible causes for this situation exist, much waste (e.g., duplication of laboratory tests) and medical errors (e.g., adverse drug reactions) are traceable to inability of healthcare providers (who are not the patients' primary providers) to access patients' existing medical information in a timely manner when needed: better and more ubiquitous health information technology might be part of the overall solution.
[5] In July 2004 the United States Department of Health and Human Services released their vision of how America's healthcare system could be rebuilt during the next decade.
Compared to local RHIOs, state-level initiatives, because of the larger number of stakeholders and patient base, and consequent financial strength, have a greater likelihood of being able to utilize national-level expertise both in health IT and policy-making.
Compared to state-level RHIOs, stakeholders tend to be more heterogeneous with respect to line of business, use of technology and size.
There is limited access to skilled technology professions, and health IT vendors pay less attention to small customers.
The computer system standardizes all clinical data as it arrives at the INPC vault, laboratory, radiology, and other study test results are mapped to a set of common test codes LOINC with standard units of measure, and patients with multiple medical record numbers are linked.
[13] Stakeholders/ participants in this RHIO include: major and regional hospital systems, regional and national reference laboratories, state, federal, and private payors, pharmacy benefit management claims repository services, major physician practice organizations, individual providers, state government (Dept.
The statewide Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), which uses the expertise of the same medical informatics/IT team as the INPC, combines clinical data in combination with administrative (claims) data to support electronic delivery of test reports to physician offices using faxes, printers, and e-mail, as well as Clinical Quality Services, which provide a "report card" (and incentives) on established quality measures to physicians, practice groups, employers, and payers.
[15] Following heavy competition with California e-Health Collaborative (CAeHC) for designation as California's statewide HIE entity, both organizations were turned down by the state government in December 2009;[16] large stakeholders such as Medicity Inc. and Kaiser Permanente subsequently followed suit and withdrew financial support.