Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN): Prototype Architectures

In its first year, the NHIN established four consortia to design and evaluate standards-based prototype architectures for the NHIN. These prototypes demonstrated the advancement of:

• Capabilities to find and retrieve healthcare information inside of health information exchanges and between health information exchanges
• The delivery of new data to appropriate recipients
• Key consumer services such as control over who can access a personal health record, data searching, ability to choose not to use a network service
• User identity proofing, authentication and authorization
• Methods for match patients to their data without a national patient identifier
• Access control and other security protections
• Specialized network functions
• The feasibility of large-scale deployment

In addition to the prototype architectures, other significant accomplishments from the first year of the NHIN included:

• Public input from three NHIN public forums
• The initial set of initial NHIN functional requirements published by the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS)
• Needed data and technical standards
• Security and business models
• Harmonized standards from the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP)
• Privacy and security recommendations from the NCVHS and the Confidentiality, Privacy, and Security working group of the American Health Information Community (AHIC)
• Core services and capabilities for Nationwide Health Information Network Health Information Exchanges (NHIE)

The four NHIN Prototype Architectures included core services and three AHIC priority areas/use cases:

• Consumer Empowerment - Registration and Medication History
• Electronic Health Record - Laboratory Result Reporting
• Biosurveillance - Connecting Clinical Care to Public Health

A Summary Report of the NHIN Prototype Architecture Contracts (PDF) is available that describes the first year’s work and details common elements that will be used in the next step in the NHIN - “NHIN Trial Implementations”.