Centralization in a RHIO: a safer, less expensive option for community hospitals

Great quote from: RHIO confidential: Experts offer advice for creating a foolproof privacy and security plan for sharing patient information

Koss said. “If you’re in a small community where most of the providers are
small and don’t have a lot of resources or technical expertise, then a
centralized service that does that on their behalf might be more secure and
private. By contrast, if you’re in downtown Boston and you’re connecting three
major medical institutions that already have a robust privacy and security
infrastructure, that’s not really an issue.”

The premise for our presentation at Microsoft MSHUG this past August on forming SEMRHIO was that the ability to minimize IT resources by using a "SaaS-like" or centrally hosted services is very important when it comes to forming a RHIO with community based hospitals. Unlike large hospitals systems, community hospital resources are already fairly stretched. These hospitals are not in a postion to manage their own RHIO infrastructure. This is especially important given that most community hospitals already have "too much on their plate" with other higher priority items such as CPOE, eMAR, P4P etc. Forming a RHIO is not exactly seen as a high priority item.