October 1, 2009 CMS Deadline to Submit Ideas on HIEs and National Exchange
Alice Lipowicz reported in FederalComputerWeek on August 21, 2009, “The Health and Human Services Department wants industry help to identify the current scope of health information exchanges and how best to foster a nationwide exchange for quality and outcome reporting.”

CMS Request for Information (RFI) posted August 20, 2009:
National Gap Analysis and Readiness Assessment for the Health Information Technology Infrastructure to Enable the Electronic Exchange of Quality Measures as part of EHR Meaningful Use
Link to RFI on FedBizOpps.gov
Excerpts from RFI Synposis :
“In preparation for the implementation of the healthcare segment of ARRA, HHS wishes to conduct a national scan of the electronic infrastructure available among all entities sharing a role in the reporting of measures, including quality measures, to potentially support meaningful EHR use in the near term and the broader exchange of health information expected with health care reform. These entities include federal agencies,…, State Medicaid agencies, other State agencies (e.g. public health departments), Health Information Exchanges/Health Information Networks, and healthcare providers.”

Nine multi-part questions cover:
1. Options to create framework for national health information infastructure, including synthesis of existing products,as well as interoperability standards, Security and privacy standards, capacity planning, existing federal and state resource investments, and draft outline of national strategy.
Requirements/ideas to develop timeline and deliverables plans for
2. National expert consensus
3. Quality reporting operations
4. CHIPRA and pediatric EHRs
5. Information flow for meaningful use date from Medicare and Medicaid providers
6. Operations between Health and quality exchanges
7. Health plan perspective for electronic exchange of quality measure
8. Alignment of measurement and data  and data transfers among  Medicare fee-for-services, Medicaid Advantage, Medicaid, and other payers
9. Description of problems, barriers with validation, manual chart collection and abstraction and strategies to ameliorate.