Perspective: Northrop Grumman's service provider model for NHIN

张琨

Perspective: Northrop Grumman's service provider model for NHIN

When Northrop Grumman was developing its prototype for a nationwide health information exchange, its goal was to make it easy for organizations and physicians to connect to regional health information organizations or health information exchanges.


“We adopted a service provider model with a flexible architecture to lower the bar for organizations to join a network,” said Robert Cothren, PhD, chief scientist for health solutions and project manager for Northrop Grumman’s NHIN project. “We thought it was very important to do this in our approach.”


Every architectural decision supported this approach. The prototype had no portal to the NHIN system. Stakeholder organizations could use their own existing applications or tap into the service provider. The use of existing applications allowed for the seamless integration of NHIN information into the electronic health record and therefore fits within the physician workflow as well as hides the complexity of the network from the users.


Northrop Grumman’s model had a federated patient identification model and no central registry or repository. It employed a record locator service to provide an easy gateway to connect to RHIOs. Cothren said Northrop Grumman wanted to answer the question: “What will drive physicians and other stakeholders to adopt and rely on NHIN capabilities?”


Northrop Grumman’s consortium developed a new concept – the permission registry service within the NHIN that allows patients to control information moving between doctors and labs and doctors. “It goes beyond simple opt-in and opt-out,” Cothren said.


The consortium demonstrated two scenarios. One involved a student visiting another place that was neither the student’s hometown nor school town. This scenario exhibited the exchange of information among three locations. The other scenario was the creation of a patient’s personal health record from the registration with a new doctor to the importation of information into the clinical system to the querying of the nationwide health information network for lab history.


Northrop Grumman led a consortium that comprised technology vendors Axolotl, First Consulting Group, Oracle Corp., RxHub, and Sun Microsystems. It worked with three communities: Santa Cruz RHIO, HealthBridge in Cincinnati and the University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland.


Like IBM, Northrop Grumman is not waiting for guidance from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Cothren said the company is exploring the business model of a network service provider. “It needs to be sustainable from a business standpoint,” he said.


The company is talking with its partners about further opportunities. “This is something we believe in,” he said. “We continue to keep momentum going. This is a business we want to be in.”