ONC: Open Source is Key to Agencies' NHIN Connections

Federal agencies' shared connection to the Nationwide Health Information Network will be open, flexible and extensible -- characteristics that could make it useful to organizations outside the federal government in the future, Federal Health Architecture officials told a conference audience here yesterday.

Speaking at a conference organized by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, leaders of the NHIN Connect project within ONC said the gateway would support six core services: subject discovery (in essence, identifying the patient), document query, document retrieval, retrieval of an audit log, a messaging platform and an authorization framework.

David Riley, the NHIN Connect program manager, said the office and its contractor, Harris Corp., are solidifying the specifications for the services. They will implement standards endorsed by the Health Information Technology Standards Panel, a panel created and supported by ONC.

However, he said, in the implementation, questions arise about precise interpretations of technical standards. "That's where the rubber meets the road," he said.