The New York State Legislature voted this week to expand and build out the statewide health information exchange (HIE) with an investment of $55 million.
The money going to the HIE, the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (the SHIN-NY), will be spend on connecting SHIN-NY’s ten regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and increasing doctor and patient participation in the network. Thus far, SHIN-NY has connected 72 percent of New York State hospitals to the HIE. SHIN-NY is overseen by the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), a non-profit that works in concert with the New York State Department of Health.
“We are thankful that Governor Cuomo, Senator Kemp Hannon, Assemblyman Dick Gottfried, the New York State Assembly led by Speaker Silver, and the Senate led by co-Leaders Skelos and Klein, have authorized critical funds in the final budget for building New York’s electronic health record system,” Dave Whitlinger, Executive Director of NYeC, said in a statement. “The SHIN-NY already provides thousands of healthcare providers with access to millions of patient records daily and we are starting to see game changing shifts in efficiency, cost and quality of care through its usage. Now is the time for us to get every aspect of the healthcare system, including the patient engaged.
In the last year, NYeC has begun to work on a patient portal for those connected by the HIE and added direct messaging capabilities between clinicians. It plans on launching an API (application programming interface) for the SHIN-NY, which will allow access to the data within the network and will serve as the gateway enabling developers to build new healthcare technology applications on top of it.
