HealthInfoNet has been full speed ahead in 2011, connecting five new hospitals and 57 ambulatory practices. New hospital participants include Goodall Hospital, St. Joseph Hospital, St. Mary's Medical Center, Cary Medical Center, and Southern Maine Medical Center. Several of these hospitals have also connected their owned physician practices, with others on track to do so in the next several months. Continuing expansion into primary care, HealthInfoNet has connected the five Bowdoin Medical Group practices, part of Martin's Point Health Care whose three Maine practices have been connected since late 2008. By the end of the year, HealthInfoNet will welcome Parkview Adventist Medical Center in Brunswick, Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockland and Penobscot Community Health Care in Bangor. 2012 will be just as busy, with more than a dozen more organizations under contract and interest from hospitals, specialty care, long-term care, and other specialty health providers. Hospitals currently under contract with HealthInfoNet represent 87% of all hospital inpatient, outpatient and emergency visit activity in Maine.  

This fall, HealthInfoNet passed the million record mark, meaning more than one million people treated in the State of Maine have a record within the health information exchange. As HealthInfoNet continues to add more providers to the exchange, that number should grow rapidly and come close to the 1.3 million residents living in the State today. Also growing as HealthInfoNet expands is the comprehensiveness of information, which is key to unlocking HealthInfoNet's potential for improving care coordination and care transitions. Already, of the million people with records in the HIE, more than 145,000 have visited two or more participating providers. And in two-hospital towns like Bangor and Lewiston, HealthInfoNet's system shows as much as a 75% patient crossover, meaning 75% of the time, patients registering at one facility already have information in the HIE.

This past September, HealthInfoNet began including a patient's immunizations in the health information exchange. This will help providers using the HIE portal prevent giving duplicate vaccinations to their patients and will help participating sites meet Meaningful Use Stage one. HealthInfoNet piloted this new functionality with both Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor and is ready to roll this out across all participating sites. HealthInfoNet has also added secondary diagnoses to patient records in the HIE, giving users a more complete picture of their patient's care.

HIN is committed to a statewide strategy to support the Nationwide Health Information Network Direct Project. Commonly referred to as simply "Direct", this project aims to help providers communicate within a trusted electronic network using certificates provided by a Health Information Service Provider (HISPs). This will give providers a secure way to send patient information directly to another provider and can be most easily thought of as secure email. This is an important complement to the HIE activities and is a necessary tool to enable communications and care coordination among providers. HealthInfoNet will work with General Electric (GE) to provide this service to Centricity EHR users throughout the State. In addition, HealthInfoNet has worked with Krysora Inc., also a contractor to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, to develop a strategy to support providers using other EHR products and those that do not have an EHR at all. HealthInfoNet expects to start offering this service in early 2012.