Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) Initiative
What is the Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) Initiative?
CHI is an initiative to create and adopt health informatics standards that are used by federal departments such as the Department of Veterans Affairs of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The goal of this initiative is to increase federal government interoperability and better exchange electronic health information.
There are four key elements of CHI:
- Assure alignment with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) administrative code sets and transaction records
- Align with HIPAA security and privacy solutions
- Adopt health information interoperability standards
- See a successful change in the culture of medical information sharing
How will the CHI initiative improve healthcare?
The CHI initiative seeks to improve interoperability, or the ability of computer systems and software to share information. By improving interoperability, it becomes easier to share information among all agencies and departments in the federal government.
Improving patient information sharing improves patient satisfaction since each department no longer needs to collect the same information. Instead, this information is collected once and can be shared with all other connected facilities.
Furthermore, when information is shared more easily, the patient is less likely to be prescribed repeat medications (especially those that were already deemed ineffective) or told to undergo the same procedure.