Another HIE related failure

Just read in Modern Health , "Patient Safety Institute folds due to lack of funding".

Unfortunately this is another case of an HIE or RHIO living off grants only to find out later that there's no true sustainability model to keep it going after the initial grant funding dries up. No one felt there was enough value in the HIE to justify further investment.


With many HIEs, its always easy to use someone else's money (i.e, government funding) to get things started. These efforts always begin with high hopes of all kinds of benefits to patient safety, cost reduction, greater efficiency etc. Somehow, when its time to use your own money, these benefits don't seem worth it. My feeling is that many of these HIEs are set up as huge bureaucracies, with all the "C's"- CEOs, COOs, CIOs. There really is no way an HIE can support this type of boated infrastructure. HIEs really need to be "lean" in order to succeed.