November 10, 2005 -- HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt has announced the award of contracts totaling $18.6 million to four groups of health care and health information technology organizations to develop prototypes for a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) architecture. The contracts awarded to these four consortia will move the nation toward the President's goal of personal electronic health records by creating a uniform architecture for health care information that can follow consumers throughout their lives.

"The Nationwide Health Information Network contracts will bring together technology developers with doctors and hospitals to create innovative state-of-the-art ideas for how health information can be securely shared," Secretary Leavitt said. "This effort will help design an information network that will transform our health care system resulting in higher quality, lower costs, less hassle and better care for American consumers."

These contracts complete the foundation for an interoperable, standards-based network for the secure exchange of health care information. HHS previously has awarded contracts to create processes to harmonize health information standards, develop criteria to certify and evaluate health IT products, and develop solutions to address variations in business policies and state laws that affect privacy and security practices that may pose challenges to the secure communication of health information.
The four consortia are led respectively by Accenture, Computer Science Corporation (CSC), International Business Machines (IBM) and Northrop Grumman. Each consortium is a partnership between technology developers and health care providers in three local health care markets. Each group will develop an architecture and a prototype network for secure information sharing among hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and physicians in the three participating markets. Additionally, all four consortia will work together to ensure that information can move seamlessly between each of the four networks to be developed, thus establishing a single infrastructure among all the consortia for the sharing of electronic health information.

"These prototypes are the key to information portability for American consumers and are a major step in our national effort to modernize health care delivery," said David J. Brailer, M.D, Ph.D., National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. "This is a critical piece of moving health IT from hope to reality."

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