CONNECT Seminar

The CONNECT Seminar, held June 29-30 2009 in Washington, DC, was organized by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The CONNECT Seminar showcased open source solutions built by federal agencies to enable secure, standards-based exchange of patient information between organizations and the National Health Information Network (NHIN). NHIN (or the Health Internet as it is now also known) will enable a secure, nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure to make health information available and accessible to providers and consumers of healthcare across communities.
CONNECT is an on-ramp to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), a network of networks for health information exchanges, providers, payers, and other stakeholders enabling standards-based connectivity and information sharing.

CONNECT is an open source connectivity solution built for use by 20 federal agencies to securely link their systems to the NHIN. Earlier this year, CONNECT was released to the public including:

• The NHIN Gateway is used to locate patients at other health organizations within the NHIN, request and receive documents associated with the patient, create audit logs of these transactions, authenticate network participants, formulate and evaluate authorizations for the release of medical information, and honor consumer preferences for sharing their information.
• The Enterprise Service Component includes a Master Patient Index (MPI), Document Registry and Repository, Authorization Policy Engine, Consumer Preferences Manager, HIPAA-compliant Audit Log and a software development kit for developing adapters to plug in existing systems such as electronic health record solutions to support the secure exchange of health information across the NHIN.
• The Universal Client Framework is used to develop applications using the Enterprise Service Component.

Speakers at the CONNECT Seminar '09 include keynoters ONC head David Blumenthal and CTO Aneesh Chopra.




Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Department of Health and Human Services





Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director for Technology, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office fo the President