The Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange, touted as the longest-running effort to launch a regional health information organization, has closed it's virtual doors because of privacy concerns and doubts about ongoing costs.
With the upcoming round of funding for the NHIN being targeted at the RHIOs themselves, I'm curious as to why they didn't hang on for additional funding, although funding wasn't exactly the problem. Nonetheless, the effort underway now to start figuring out what the RHIOs have learned, and how to share the information nationally will be shortchanged if SBCCDE doesn't get to particpate.
While hugely unfortunate that they can't keep the exchange running, SBCCDE could now serve as a goldmine of lessons learned. An additional bonus is the comment from the California Healthcare Foundation, which put an initial $10 million into the exchange, saying it will consider open-sourcing the software created to run the exchange for other RHIOs to use.
If anyone has any idea who we can write to to show our support for this idea, please comment.
Friday, March 9, 2007
California Data Exchange Folds
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Relevant update: see this story from Crain's HITS daily. It neatly summarizes the vacuum currently occupying the space where national privacy guidelines *ought* to be.
Follow-up: What Killed the Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange?
iHealthBeat has a write up by Bruce Merlin Fried, Esq., whose law firm served as counsel to SBCCDE, helping to unearth the gajillion privacy laws that impact clinical data exchange.
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