Update: More Details On MTIA/Verizon Health Information Exchange Project
From a press release from MD-IT, one of the charter members of the Medical Transcription Service Consortium, with some interesting tidbits highlighted:
The Medical Transcription Service Consortium (MTSC) – formed by ICSA
Labs, an independent division of Verizon Business, and the Medical
Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) – will develop a common
framework for the seamless and secure exchange of PHI among consortium
members and their health care clients. The new framework will support
structured narrative notes, which read like a text document but include
XML tags that unlock valuable data, enabling both the narrative note
and clinical data to be imported into an electronic medical record.
Charter members of the consortium, in addition to MD-IT, include
leading MTSOs MedQuist, MxSecure, Sten-Tel, and Webmedx, plus Verizon
Business, which will develop the new IT platform using security best
practices.
“While our clients can exchange information today with other
practices on the MD-IT network, it is exciting that within a few
months, they will be able to send and receive records among 2,500
hospitals and 375,000 physicians nationwide who are current clients of
consortium members,” said Robin Daigh, a vice president with MD-IT.
“The cost is very affordable, with monthly fees comparable to those for
electronic fax services, and requiring only a PC with internet
connectivity for access to the network. We have found that our clients
can save money overall by eliminating the current labor-intensive
process of faxing and mailing.”
“The consortium holds the potential to rapidly accelerate the
exchange of electronic records from tens of thousands of records to
millions of records per month,” noted Thomas Carson, president of
MD-IT. “Consortium members produce an estimated 200 million narrative
patient notes annually and have over 2.5 billion patient records in
electronic archive. This is a great way to kick start the ambitious
goal of having all health care providers connected through a secure
digital network."