Accenture will demonstrate its prototype solution for a fully integrated health information systemat the 3rd Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Forum on Thursday, Jan. 25, in Washington D.C. The solution, which Accenture previewed yesterday for the American Health Information Community (AHIC), chaired by HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, shows that patient data can be extracted from disparate information systems and converted to a common format that enables sharing among physician offices, medical laboratories, hospitals and other clinical settings.

The Accenture prototype, which works with legacy clinical systems, is a step toward building an interoperable, standards-based network. In November 2005, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a contract to Accenture to develop a prototype network for secure information sharing among three healthcare communities: West Virginia Medical Institute (southern West Virginia), Commonwealth of Kentucky's Eastern Region Health Community and CareSpark (north-eastern Tennessee and south-western Virginia). This region has a wide variety of clinical systems among the 15 provider organizations that participated in the NHIN prototype, similar in nature to the majority of the U.S.

Accenture's prototype introduces both common language and data standards and integrates information across the entire healthcare system at the national, regional and provider levels. It enables a single view of a patient's medical information, drawn from multiple databases, as one combined electronic health record. This approach, which allows the industry to build on existing investments in legacy provider systems, will enable the rapid implementation of a secure infrastructure to facilitate data sharing.

Accenture led a consortium of technology vendors in the development of the NHIN prototype. Core aspects of the solution were provided by: Cisco, Initiate, Oracle, Orion Health, Quovadx and Sun. In addition, a number of technology organizations provided fundamental services and components required in the development of the NHIN prototype. These organizations include: Apelon, BEA, CCSI, CGI Federal, Eclipsys, Intellithought, Lucent Glow, Oakland Consulting Group, Reactivity and Red Hat.

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