Transcription Providers, Verizon To Create Health Information Exchange Infrastructure For Transcribed Medical Records
In a move reported by Reuters
and other sources, a newly formed industry group called the Medical
Transcription Service Consortium has announced plans to create "a new IT platform for the secure exchange of digitized transcriptions of physician-dictated patient notes."
Creation of the MTSC was spearheaded by the Medical Transcription
Industry Association (MTIA) and ICSA Labs, an independent division of
Verizon Business. In addition to ICSA Labs and the MTIA, the charter
members of the consortium are Verizon and medical transcription service
providers MD-IT, MedQuist, MxSecure, Sten-Tel and Webmedx. According to
a press release, the platform, which is expected to be available later
this year, will "leverage Verizon Business' broad portfolio of
advanced IT, hosting and security solutions, as well as the company's
global IP network. The platform will be designed to the specifications
determined by the MTSC, including the use of security best practices,
and will enable the objective testing and certification for privacy,
security and interoperability."
I spoke with Lea Sims, Director of Professional Programs for AHDI
and MTIA, about this new endeavor. She described this project as "a secure exchange highway where health records would be available and
accessible through a platform to multiple
users via a single digital portal
for information exchange." She said the goal of the initiative was to "demonstrate to healthcare that our sector is positioning itself as a
solution/value-add to healthcare's goal for interoperability and
secure exchange/access beyond just our ability
to generate the document but to also be a secure
solution for information exchange." Sims said that the MTSC project was being coordinated with the Health Story Project
and would most likely be based on an HL7/CDA exchange architecture. She
said the new platform would connect to the National Health Information
Network (NHIN) and complement the work that is being done by Regional
Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) in terms of building a
national health information exchange infrastructure.
Sims said many of the details of the MTSC project are still being
hammered out, including how the platform will be monetized as well as
whether the MTSC "digital highway" would represent an actual central
health data repository or simply a platform for exchanging information
between individual data repositories maintained by the individual
transcription service providers.
When asked about potential roadblocks to the successful
implementation of this project, Sims cited as examples the willingness
of transcription service providers to collaborate with competitors and
their collective commitment to making it happen. She said no timetable
for implementation has been set as of yet.
Certainly it's interesting to see that a major IT and communications
player like Verizon is on board with this project; at the very least
that would indicate they believe there's a market for something like
this. In my mind there are still a lot of questions to be answered,
including who would control the release of the transcribed records that
would be exchanged and/or stored by the MTSC, and how something like
this would fit into the HIPAA regulatory picture. In any case, it will
be interesting to watch the development of this initiative in the
coming months.