Healthcare is rapidly evolving as new technologies are harnessed to share patient data around the nation.

The US government is taking steps towards better quality, more cost-effective healthcare by heavily promoting interoperability of healthcare systems and data. At the core of any healthcare initiative, patients must be accurately identified every time, without fail.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services selected four consortia to design National Health Information Network (NHIN) architecture prototypes as a foundation for interoperable, secure, standards-based health information exchange on a national level. The four consortia, led by Accenture, IBM, CSC and Northrop Grumman, worked with a variety of partners to demonstrate the capabilities and feasibility of true interoperability. Initiate software was chosen by three of the four consortia as the enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution and record locator service (RLS). The fourth consortium also integrated Initiate technology through an existing partnership.

The consortia joined technology developers and healthcare providers in three local healthcare markets. Each group developed architecture and a prototype network for accurate, secure information sharing among hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and physicians in their participating markets.

With technology that accurately matches and identifies patient records across communities, Initiate Systems has proven its capabilities against rigorous testing, creating complete, accurate patient views across regions.

In each scenario, Initiate software accurately matched and linked patient records, scaling to handle increasingly large quantities of data. Additionally, Initiate provides IHE-compliant support for Health Level 7 (HL7) standards. In fact, Initiate was the only vendor at the January 2007 IHE Connectathon to achieve compliance for Patient Identifier Cross-reference (PIX) and Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) Manager profiles for both HL7 V2.x and V3.

Initiate software breaks down the barriers between systems, delivering outstanding performance with large volumes of data and numerous data sources. With Initiate software, records can be located and linked instantly and accurately, across data sources, in real time. The result is access to a single view of a patient’s records, drawn from multiple provider systems, enabling better care.