Jefferson City, MO - The Missouri Office of Health Information Technology (MO-HITECH) continued its strategic planning process through two days of workgroup meetings December 15-16.  The outcome of the planning process will be a definition of the technical architecture, operational structure, governance model, legal/policy framework, and financing model for Missouri statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE).  The MO-HITECH planning process is following an ambitious schedule--the state's strategic plan must be completed and submitted to the Federal Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology by the end of February 2010.

OCI is involved in several MO-HITECH workgroups working on various parts of the strategic plan, including Technical Infrastructure, Business &
Technical Operations, and Governance.  Workgroup meetings are held approximately every two weeks in Jefferson City, with surveys, reviews, and other activities between meetings.  Through OCI's participation in these workgroups, we are applying our substantial experience and expertise in building open, low-cost, dependable, and scalable distributed systems to help the state achieve its goals of improving the affordability, quality, and value of healthcare for all Missourians.  OCI is able to provide a unique perspective to the state's HIE planning efforts based on our involvement in the Federal Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) CONNECT open source software initiative.