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Interim Assessment of Variation of Business Practices, Policies, and State Law

Human profile with super-imposed padlock, representing privacy and security of protected health information.
The Interim Assessment of Variation of Business Practices, Policies, and State Laws Report is the first in a series to be produced under RTI International's contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The contract, entitled Privacy and Security Solutions for Interoperable Health Information Exchange, is managed by AHRQ and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The report is a summary of 34 separate interim reports submitted by 33 States and one territory as subcontractors to RTI; these subcontractors form the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration (HISPC).

The purpose of the Privacy and Security Solutions for Interoperable Health Information Exchange project is to assess variations in organization-level business practices, policies, and State laws that affect electronic health information exchange and to identify and propose practical ways to reduce the variation to those "good" practices that will permit interoperability while preserving the necessary privacy and security requirements set by the local community.

State teams engaged a broad array of stakeholders within their State to:

  1. Review organization-level business practices to assess the variation and identify good practices as well as those that will require modification to be applied sensibly to electroic health information exchange (eHIE).
  2. Develop consensus-based solutions to reduce variation and other barriers to interoperability.
  3. Develop detailed plans for implementing solutions.

The Interim Assessment of Variation of Business Practices, Policies, and State Law (IAV) summarizes and analyzes reports submitted by the 34 subcontracted State teams and represents a "first look" at the major areas States have identified as presenting challenges to achieving interoperable electronic health information exchange. This summary report captures the highlights from the 34 reports and presents some of the major crosscutting themes that have been raised during this first phase of the project.

  • Interim Assessment Executive Summary (PDF, 333 KB, Text) .
  • Interim Assessment Report (PDF, 333 KB, Text) .

Individual Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration Reports

In addition to the IAV, many of the HISPC teams have made their reports available online. These reports can be found on the individual team Web sites, which can be accessed via the HISPC main page on the AHRQ Health IT Web site.