Regional health information organization (RHIO) is a one of the varieties of health information exchange that brings together stockholders in healthcare within defined demographic place and is used to govern the exchange of health information amongst them. The purpose is to improve healthcare in that community. Currently, most efforts of health information exchange are the regional health information organizations. It includes a range of participating healthcare provider entities and other stakeholders as the laboratories, payers, and public health departments which are often under the management of the board of directors that comprise of representatives from all the participating organizations (Blee 2013).
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In order for regional health information organizations to be established, stockholders should develop consensus on what information can be shared among the participating entities. There is a need for stakeholders to consent to Data use agreement before any information exchange is undertaken.
There are three different approaches or architectures to RHIOs which include; centralized architecture, federated architecture and hybrid architecture. Federated architecture is an approach to the interchanging of electronic information, controlled and regulated sharing among the autonomous databases within RHIO. Independent databases are connected to exchange and share information.
Centralized architecture is an approach to RHIO interchange of electronic information and the data sharing emphasizing full control over data sharing through a repository that is centralized. In this architecture, components refer to the requestor and the Central Data Repository (CDR). CDR authenticates the requester through the technological means, authorizing records and transactions for reporting and audit purposes. The benefits of this architecture are that once data is centralized and restructured into uniform data model, it is easy to query and analyze.
Hybrid architecture is the combination of centralized and federated architectures. For example, in RHIO may have pharmacy transactions taking place within federal model and on the other hand lab data is shared via centralized database. The providers using this architecture may decide to share a patient’s data peer-to-peer or CDR means.
References
Clinical Informatics (2007). Regional Health Information Organizations. Retrieved 26th June, 2014 from < http://www.informatics-review.com/wiki/index.php/RHIO >.
HRSA. (2000). Regional health information organization (RHIO). Retrieved June 26, 2014 from < http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/toolbox/HealthITtoolbox/Collaboration/whatisrhio.html>
Castro D. (2007). Improving Health Care: Why a Dose of IT May Be Just What the Doctor Ordered. Washington, DC: The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
