EAST LANSING, Mich., Dec. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Western States Consortium (WSC) has welcomed the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) as an official Satellite member of the consortium.  MiHIN Executive Director Tim Pletcher observed "WSC Membership gives MiHIN a unique opportunity to share our innovations on a national scale and gain invaluable input from recognized thought leaders outside Michigan. This type of collaboration serves as an HIT accelerant to ensure MiHIN efforts continue to reduce provider data sharing barriers, lower costs and improve the quality of health care for people throughout Michigan."

The Satellite membership will allow MiHIN to collaborate with the efforts of the states participating in WSC, contributing aspects of its Salesforce.com-based Health Provider Directory model with the WSC while receiving in exchange innovations from the WSC member states.  Contributions will be focused on provider directories promoting privacy and security, increasing the realization of interstate information exchange with accurate routing to trusted destinations via open-standards with other services developed independently among participating states.  

MiHIN and the WSC will leverage the initial research completed by the WSC in pilots led by California and Oregon. As a member of the WSC, MiHIN will participate in future pilots of incremental Provider Directory features that will address mutual needs of the group affording other participating States the ability to quickly adopt outcomes from these pilots in their respective state.

Aaron Seib, of the Western States Consortium, observed "After viewing MiHIN's Community of Practice presentation of Michigan's approach to solving Provider Directory issues via federation of multiple HIOs within their state - and discussions with MiHIN's Executive Director Tim Pletcher - the learning opportunities to collaborate with MI as part of the WSC were readily apparent."

MiHIN Associate Director Jeff Livesay added "HIE at MiHIN means using HIT services you can trust.  We hope to learn as much as possible from the Western States' approaches to trusted interstate data exchange while also sharing the advances we have made in Michigan. Closely working with other states maximizes the return on the funding for national HIE infrastructure and helps drive faster adoption of interoperability standards and national health information exchange."

MiHIN is dedicated to improving the quality and decreasing the cost of health care by supporting the sharing of health information.  Satellite membership in the WSC facilitates more expansive sharing of information across states, pooling of resources and continued growth in HIT through sharing knowledge, experience, and overall success.

About Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) Shared Services

The Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) is Michigan's initiative to improve health care quality, efficiency, and patient safety through the sharing of electronic health information, while reducing costs. MiHIN is the official state designated entity for health information exchange across Michigan and the future integration with the eHealth Exchange. MiHIN is a Michigan nonprofit entity, functioning as a public and private collaboration between the State of Michigan, sub-state Health Information Exchanges, payers, providers, and patients. For more information please visit www.mihin.org.

MiHIN's SalesForce.com-based statewide Health Provider Director introduces a new level of provider relationship management with its sophisticated provider relationship model built in Force.com.  MiHIN's approach establishes unique identities for healthcare providers, stores their electronic delivery addresses (i.e. which HIE they belong to and their Direct secure email address) and the SalesForce.com application inherently maintains relationships with multiple organizations including hospitals, clinics, and state governments to ensure securely targeted transmission of electronic health information.  The Force.com platform selected by MiHIN allows new features and applications to be built quickly into Salesforce's cloud computing infrastructure with instant deployment globally through web browsers and mobile devices.

About the Western States Consortium

The Western States Consortium partner states began meeting early this year to discuss the policies and technology standards that would be required to "trust" each other, and create agreements that would form a trust community among the states. Care Accord, Oregon's Statewide Health Information Service Provider (HISP), and NCHIN (the Direct Secure

Messaging HISP in Northern California) had to meet these criteria before participating in the pilot.  Oregon and California are lead states in the Western States Consortium project. The purpose of the Consortium is to enable safe and secure exchange of health information between and among health care providers in the western states. The founding states of Western State Consortium include Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah.  Michigan joins other satellite states including Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Georgia and Florida.

SOURCE Michigan Health Information Network