Just a day after the federal government awarded $18.6 million to build four health information exchange prototypes, healthcare IT vendors said a new era of interoperability is at hand.

At the World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress on Nov. 10, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt announced awards to four consortia of technology vendors and providers led by Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), International Business Machines (IBM) and Northrop Grumman. Each will develop an architecture and a prototype network for secure information sharing among hospitals, labs, pharmacies and doctors in the three participating markets (see page 33 for a complete list of participants).

The government had planned on awarding six contracts, but uncertainty over funding for healthcare IT projects in the fiscal year 2006 budget only allowed the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to award four contracts, ONCHIT chief David Brailer, MD, said. The contracts are worth a little less than $5 million each.

According to Ivo Nelson of IBM, the most important aspect of the prototype project is the government's requirement that all four groups work together to ensure that information can move seamlessly between each of the four networks to be developed.

"I think what Dr. Brailer has done with the Office of National Coordinator awards is absolutely brilliant," said Nelson. "We're less competitors than collaborators."

Microsoft's William O'Leary agreed. "The interesting point in all of this is that they are going to have to interoperate – there's now a commitment to that," he said.

Jeff Rideout, MD, Cisco's vice president of the Internet business solutions group in the company's healthcare practice, proclaimed "that there's a movement afoot… to build a national network architecture that can provide data to all providers."

While most vendors say they're on board the interoperability bandwagon, some providers remain skeptical of their intentions.

"I don't think, globally, vendors are pushing for interoperability," said Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain Health Care. "I haven't seen it in the global vendor pool."

"There's not nearly enough being done," agreed Sharp Healthcare CIO Bill Spooner. "The core health information systems vendors don't see it as in their self-interest to interoperate – they want to sell you everything. But I think interoperability can be a competitive advantage, and it should be."

But Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Information Technologies, said vendors have shown they can come together to solve interoperability challenges. Ten years ago, he noted, vendors and physicians began working together to create a "highly successful standards strategy – IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise)" that spawned what now amounts to a $2 billion industry in image and data sharing around DICOM and HL7 standards.

"Interoperability is clearly a central theme of how we look at IT now," Wanchoo said. "A recent study estimates it will save $80 billion annually, so we have to be able to provide interoperability."