Michigan HIE Taps Health IT to Advance Interoperability Use Cases

Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) has partnered with health IT vendor Smile Digital Health to drive health information exchange (HIE) interoperability across the state.

As Michigan's non-profit state-designated HIE, MiHIN will leverage Smile's Health Data Fabric (HDF) to build an open standards ecosystem that supports robust privacy, security, and scalability to enhance interoperability services.

The implementation is also set to boost growth for MiHIN's national subsidiary HIE network operated by Velatura Public Benefit Corporation. MiHIN and Velatura will use the HDF to advance data sharing use cases and support Velatura's gateway hub as part of the national Patient Centered Data Home (PCDH) initiative.

"Enabling meaningful health data sharing hinges on open standards, freeing information from silos and fostering seamless integration between data and care," Tim Pletcher, DHA, executive director of MiHIN, said in a public statement.

"Smile's steadfast dedication to open standards perfectly aligns with MiHIN's unwavering drive to establish a forward-looking and market-responsive HIE, facilitating the seamless integration of clean, actionable data, real-time quality measures, point-of-care clinical insights, and more," he added.

MiHIN opted for Smile's platform due to its event-driven design to enable real-time data exchange and updates and its open standards-based ecosystem to support interoperability.

"Quality healthcare requires quality data and insights to ensure positive patient and population health outcomes," said Shane McNamee, MD, chief growth officer at Smile Digital Health. "MiHIN's use-case factory and equitable business models are a perfect match for our FHIR data platform to ensure the safe, just-in-time, delivery of contextualized information wherever the patient chooses to get their care."

"This move ensures that they can scale with growing data volumes due to increasing demands as they grow with Velatura," McNamee added. "A next-generation HIE will significantly improve healthcare data exchange and overall patient care. We're proud to play a crucial part in MiHIN's continuing digital transformation."