I called our state HIE director, and this is what I was told:
The very short answer is they hope to be going live in late June or July of this year. Having said that, we had a prolonged conversation about what that meant. It is not going to be an "all at once" event, but rather a work in progress.
Probably at first we will be able to get notification that a document for a patient "with whom we have a relationship" is available on the HIE, and we can then go get it. What that document consists of, and how it is structured, depends on a lot of factors. It may well be a CCD, but the contents of that CCD can be anything from what AC puts out (demographics, problem and med list) to the "whole banana" of the record. This is up to the EHR vendor. Right now, each EHR vendor has more or less "slapped together" a CCD format that meets the minimum requirements for MU, but is not otherwise actually of much use. Each EHR structures things differently, each one will have to build its interface, and the cost to each customer (be it lab, hospital or physician) needs to be determined. Add to that, there are different formats for things like lab tests, so the lab information generated by our hospital, for example, will not come in the same way data from Quest comes in. The capability exists for interfaces to be built that will translate one format into another, but who pays for those things is undefined. The same situation exists for radiology reports, discharge summaries, and pretty much every other piece of data out there. It is a tower of Babel.
My conclusion is that the eventual hope is that all EHR's and information generating entities will one day talk to one another, but that is not going to be anytime real soon.
