ICA meets with CIHIE providers. From left: Bob Karlson, Director of Client Management; John Murdoch, Client Manager; and Peter Holzaepfel, Integration Engineer.

Key players are meeting this week to begin gathering technical requirements to help connect charter member hospitals and provider organizations to the Central Illinois Health Information Exchange (CIHIE). The exchange will allow multiple healthcare providers to securely share medical information so that patients have their healthcare records when and where they are needed.

CIHIE will 'go live' later this year and will ultimately connect providers in 20 counties in central Illinois. If all regional healthcare providers choose to participate in CIHIE, the exchange would cover approximately 1.3 million people's medical information. This information could be shared by 27 hospitals, 20 health departments, 2,800 physicians, 280 pharmacies, 12 labs and imaging centers and numerous ancillary healthcare providers such as rehabilitation centers, behavioral healthcare, long-term facilities and nursing homes across the central Illinois region.

All of these providers have their own data systems, which will be integrated to a secure central system. Informatics Corporation of America (ICA) is the technology partner and will supply the infrastructure to aggregate all the data required to populate a patient's chart.

"We like to describe it as similar to Expedia," said CIHIE Technical Project Lead David Miller. "You type in a patient's name and demographic information and it actually goes out and searches. So it is not like it creates a record that's static. It is very dynamic. Every time you request (information for) a patient, it goes and looks again."

Methodist Medical Center's IT team hashed out preliminary plans with ICA representatives on Tuesday. ICA met with OSF Saint Francis the day before and will soon meet with Proctor Hospital, covering the three major hospitals of Peoria. They will meet with other charter member organizations in Bloomington and Decatur the rest of the week.

"I always say the CIHIE is like the NFL," said Bob Karlson, director of client management at ICA, referring to the CIHIE governance board. "The CIHIE is the people that make the rules around patient consent, data sharing, reporting -- all those kind of things."

Following the analogy, each organization is its own team, according to Karlson.

"Our job is to be that referee, to make sure we pull all that data in and we get everything where you can use it," said Karlson. "Each organization -- their system is different from another. The way we integrate them will be a little bit different for each."

The meetings are designed to not only introduce the teams, but to help ICA understand the organization's unique data systems and identify any potential barriers.

The Methodist team answered questions and asked many in return.

"The team at Methodist, just like the team at OSF, really has their stuff together," said Miller. "They knew exactly what they needed to present to us. They knew how to answer questions. We look forward to working with and gathering the technical requirements from all the charter members."

"In the past, one of the things we've seen is that people have been skeptical because they didn't understand exactly what a health exchange is," said Karlson. "But this community seems to be pretty well educated on what it is we are trying to accomplish, which is a big step forward."