State HIE Cooperative Agreement Program Project Abstract
Vermont State HIT-HIE Program
Hunt Blair
Deputy Director for Health Care Reform
Office of Vermont Health Access
Agency of Human Services
312 Hurricane Lane, Suite 201
Williston, VT 05495
Phone: 802-879-5988
Fax: 802-879-5919
Email: hunt.blair@ahs.state.vt.us
Web: http://hcr.vermont.gov
Congressional District: Vermont 1
Vermont is recognized as a national leader in the alignment and integration of Health
Information Technology (HIT), Health Information Exchange (HIE), and reform of the
health care delivery system. Health information exchange and technology are a consistent
focus of Vermont health policy attention, but always in the broader context of enabling
transformative delivery system change. Because of that systems approach, meaningful
use of HIT has been built into Vermont???s vision from the outset. Our goal is nothing short
of transforming the health care delivery system by, in part, ensuring the technical
infrastructure to support practitioners and patients, for an enhanced system of care.
The Cooperative Agreement funds, in combination with CMS funding to the state
authorized under Sec. 4201 of ARRA, CMS funding related to the state MMIS, and
resources from the state Health IT Fund, will enable Vermont to achieve its goal of
establishing a fully operational statewide health information exchange network within the
first two years of ONC funding, building on a five year base of planning, consensus
building, governance refinement, and creation and early implementation of a standardsbased
technical architecture. An intensive period of operational planning will be
completed as the first phase of the project, followed by statewide HIE implementation it
will now be possible to scale up dramatically in a compressed time frame.
Presently, 8 hospitals and 13 primary care practices are connected to the Vermont HIE
Network (VHIEN) operated by Vermont Information Technology Leaders, Inc. (VITL),
but the connectivity is generally limited to lab feeds and/or medication history and the
growth of the VHIEN has been sporadic to date. The ONC HIE funding will enable
planned expansion of bi-directional interfaces to all the hospitals in the state ??? as well as
to a neighboring state???s tertiary care center ??? by 2011 supporting clinical messaging,
exchange of Continuity of Care Documents, CPOE, and lab and imaging reporting.
Full bi-directional statewide connectivity to the hospitals will in turn help to drive
statewide expansion of HIT and HIE at the practice and provider level. That expansion
effort is being organized regionally in each of Vermont???s discrete Hospital Service Areas
(HSA), because while the infrastructure is statewide, most HIE happens locally. The
VHIEN also provides the connectivity backbone for the statewide clinical registry, care
management, and reporting tool (DocSite) utilized by the Vermont Blueprint for Health,
enabling both personalized and population-based care coordination and management for
the Blueprint???s integrated primary care medical homes and community health teams,
providing further value to participating providers. By the end of the Project Period,
Vermont???s HIT-HIE infrastructure will have received the boost to be fully operational
statewide and will demonstrate its value to ensure long term sustainability