Yesterday I shared my experience from the morning half of the 2012 VITL Summit, and I wanted to continue sharing that experience here.  I was quite interested to see what is happening with health information exchanges, and was lucky enough to have Jennifer Moran, a Solutions Engineer at VITL, provide her VITL HIE 101 breakout session (aka Technical Introduction to Health Information Exchange).

Jennifer helped to define Health Information Exchange (HIE), and more specifically The Vermont HIE (VHIE).  Luckily for geeks like me, she had some quite in-depth diagrams of how things work, but she was nice enough to explain the different parts of the HIE in plain English so everyone could understand. She covered a couple of the data formatting standards used by VHIE (HL7 versions 2 and 3), as well as the options for sending data to, and receiving data from VHIE.

My final breakout before heading back to the office was part of the Meaningful Use Track; entitled “Stage 2 Rules.”  This presentation by Michelle Nelson (MPA, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) helped to solidify the changes between stage 1 and stage 2 MU.  It seems to me that the changes moves things in a good direction, but the bar is set higher, as many of the existing requirements that remain will require higher adoption rates.

I always appreciate the opportunity to get a glimpse into the local community and their progress in regards to improving healthcare.  I was able to meet some new people in between the sessions, as well as catch up with some existing partner resources.  I look forward to attending VITL Summit in the coming years, as I feel it is a great forum for HIT initiatives in Vermont.