The Indiana Network for Patient Care: a Working Local Health Information Infrastructure. An Example of a Working Infrastructure Collaboration that Links Data from Five Health Systems and Hundreds of Millions of Entries

The Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) is a local health information infrastructure (LHII) that includes information from the five major hospital systems (15 hospitals), the county and state public health departments, and Indiana Medicaid and RxHub. This network carries 660 million separate results. It provides cross-institutional access to physicians in emergency rooms and hospitals based on patient-physician proximity or on hospital credentialing. The network includes and delivers laboratory, radiology, dictation, and other documents to a majority of Indianapolis office practices. LHIIs must focus their limited resources on the high-volume data producers, which often are large hospital systems.  LHIIs can be expected to improve efficiency and reduce cost growth.  However, if their primary purpose becomes cost control, they will likely fail, as did the community health information networks (CHINs) of the 1990s.  The INPC began operation seven years ago and is one of the first and best examples of an LHII.