Massive State Health Data Project Enters New Phase
Capital New York; Dan Goldberg, 7/6/2015
New York hospitals will embark today on the next phase of a massive, state-funded initiative that could soon allow doctors and patients throughout the state to share medical records.
The launch of the program, called the State Health Information Network for New York, or SHIN-NY, amounts to a crucial test of the new data-sharing system, which the state has already committed $100 million to develop over the course of nearly three years.
SHIN-NY (pronounced shiny) is an electronic hub that will connect all the doctors and patients across the state, allowing them to share data in a way that will improve care and potentially reduce cost, while giving public health officials an unprecedented ability to spot trends.
The data that will be shared across the state by SHIN-NY is currently held by Regional Health Information Organizations, or RHIOs, which are nine separate exchanges that operate across the state.
Since 2012, the goal has been to connect the RHIOs to one another so that a patient with congestive heart failure in Buffalo could see a cardiologist in Manhattan without having to bring along any records.
As New York eHealth Collaborative executive director David Whitlinger explains it, the nine RHIOs are the spokes and SHIN-NY is the wheel. NYeC is the nonprofit entity responsible for administering the project.
On Monday, NYeC will begin testing whether three of the RHIOs—Hixny, which covers the Capitol District, HealthLinkNY, which covers the southern tier and the Hudson Valley, and HealtheConnections, which covers the Syracuse region—can in fact talk to SHIN-NY and, by extension, one another.
The first step is to ensure security works in the production environment and that data exchange works correctly.
That testing is expected to take three to four weeks. If all goes well, the next three RHIOs will come on board in August, followed by the final three in September.
“Once that happens, they will be free to exchange data with each other,” said Jim Kirkwood, community health program manager for the state’s health department.
The SHIN-NY system was first announced three years ago.
In 2014, the state health department renewed its focus on the SHIN-NY initiative after concerns were raised that progress was not keeping pace with expectations.
There had been “mission creep” at NYeC, Pat Roohan, the health department’s director of quality and patient safety, told Capital in May, and the department wanted to prioritize connectivity, ensuring that the most basic function of the SHIN-NY system—the ability to connect the RHIOs—would work as intended.
Still, it’s a long way before the SHIN-NY is up and running and a lot can still go awry.
“We’re not at the golden spike, ribbon-cutting moment,” Whitlinger said. “We’re not as excited about July 7th as we will be about October.”