NIH Grant to Fund Image Access Project Using the NHIN

David Rosenfeld | | Radiology Business | Business Intelligence
The National Institutes of Health recently awarded a $2.25 million grant to Heart IT and Johns Hopkins University to develop a method for accessing images using the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). Johns Hopkins is partnering with the cardiac PACS vendor to develop interoperability standards required to access images via the NHIN. While the NHIN is used mainly by government agencies, several projects intended to connect healthcare providers to the NHIN have been announced in the past year, according to an article in Fierce Health IT. The Hopkins/Health IT project if successful could bring physicians onto the network. The RSNA Image Share Network, the recipient of a separate NIH grant, began enrolling its first patients in August as part of an effort that seeks to make exchanging medical images much easier. Traditional barriers to image exchange include lack of cooperation between competitive institutions and a strong patient privacy lobby that often resists unique patient identifiers, David Avrin, MD, vice chair of informatics at UCSF Medical Center (San Francisco, California) told RadInformatics.com earlier this year.Read the full RadInformatics.com article on RSNA Image Share Network enrolling its first patients.

David Rosenfeld

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