Sandbox cloud
VHA’s Innovation Sandbox Cloud has a mission comparable to that of Georgia Tech’s I3L.

“VHA’s Innovation Sandbox Cloud serves as a virtual space to facilitate health IT innovation through collaboration and the development of new ideas, requirements and products that can become solutions within VistA,” said Craig Luigart, chief officer, VHA Office of Health Information. "Our health data systems interconnection with Georgia Tech’s I3L Sandbox is a landmark in the government’s Health Information Technology Innovation and Development Environments (HITIDE) initiative." The HITIDE initiative supports the development of interoperable health IT systems by leveraging existing federal agency health IT test bed environments for a cross-agency, virtual, active, innovation ecosystem.

[Related: NASCIO's 12 tips for states considering the cloud.]

Beyond connecting electronic health records systems and helping them share information, I3L will also link to Gwinnett Technical College’s health IT certificate program to help expand the workforce needed to build and maintain health IT systems. The initiative, funded by the U.S. Employment and Training Administration, connects students – including veterans – to state-of-the-market training resources.

“Industry is telling us that it needs a health IT work force with a different set of skills than what is now available in the marketplace,” said Marla Gorges, associate director of Georgia Tech’s Health@EI2 program. “Through the Gwinnett Technical College program, I3L will give students access to a wide range of commercial and open source systems.”

Already, Gorges said, the resources of I3L have been used in Georgia Tech courses, helping students to learn the real-world issues of health IT and propose solutions for them.

The overall goal for these initiatives is to improve patient care and community health through better exchange of information, Rushing said.

“Other industries have transitioned to electronic systems, but none of them has faced the complexity of the health care industry,” he added. “As the largest organization paying for health care services, the federal government has been pushing for an integrated health care information system that would allow patient records to be shared by all those caring for a specific patient.”

[See also: Cloud, mobile health on display at Government Health IT conference.]

Georgia Tech’s expertise and experience with interoperability issues in other areas – such as connecting criminal justice information networks in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice – provides a foundation for what it expects to do in health care IT. Its connections to designers of medical devices, information security specialists and developers of wireless communications systems at Georgia Tech and elsewhere will also help anticipate the future of healthcare information systems.

“We are standing up a healthcare test bed that builds on all our work in the past with how to tie networks together and ensure that they’re set up in such a way that regardless of the network and the information exchange elements, we can still share elements and databases,” said Evans. “We are setting up not only an interoperability lab, but also an environment where we can see how this will work in the future.”