New Mexico appoints official health info exchange

New Mexico has officially designated the New Mexico Health Information Collaborative (NMHIC) as the state’s health information exchange, responsible for connecting healthcare providers to a centralized network. The move will help drive critical change in the way patients are cared for, officials say, expanding the number of providers who can use electronic health records.

In his announcement, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said NMHIC was an obvious choice to help the state achieve high quality, affordable health care. NMHIC was created in 2004 and connects several leading healthcare providers, payers, employers and state agencies to a centralized health information exchange (HIE).

The NMHIC health exchange uses Cincinnati-based MedPlus, a HIE and health IT developer and integrator, to transfer lab results, patient record summaries, radiology images, discharge summaries, medication history and claims data. Users of the NMHIC HIE are able to view patient-specific data from different systems through a single Web-based interface. MedPlus provides data exchange services, which forms the foundation for the collection, integration, aggregation and distribution of clinical data, while preserving it behind the sponsoring organization’s firewall, according to the company.

“HIEs are an important component of driving better outcomes for patients and more efficient health care,” Richard Mahoney, president of MedPlus and vice president of Healthcare Information Solutions at Quest Diagnostics, said in a statement. “Organizations such as NMHIC are the foundation of building a better health care system and we are honored to be playing such an important role in helping them to achieve their goals.”

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