I am excited to announce that today, February 11, 2012, we are releasing CONNECT version 4.0, which supports the current federal IT standards and Meaningful Use Stage 2 core objectives related to the secure electronic exchange of information. This is done through CONNECT’s support of Direct project specifications and NwHIN transports (i.e., electronically sending and receiving patient data, registering immunization information, public health reporting and patient access to data).

What is CONNECT?
CONNECT is a dynamic, open source platform for the secure exchange of health information. The health information exchange (HIE) open source platform is the result of an extensive collaboration effort between the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) and its federal partners – including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

CONNECT Benefits:

For agencies and organizations, they:

• Can securely exchange health data with other users throughout the world who have adopted exchange solutions that implement the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) specifications and standards.

For patients:

• They benefit from the design of CONNECT because it ensures that a patient’s health record follows their journey throughout the health care system, even across geographical boundaries.

Why CONNECT?

The expansion of HIE within the federal, state, and private sectors is often met with confusion and questions surrounding standards, interoperability, and ease of implementation – all necessary in helping providers achieve Meaningful Use.

One way to address these questions and concerns is to provide a solution(s) through collaboration with key stakeholders within the health information exchange community. Through collaboration, stakeholders are able to talk through their unique requirements, the challenges they face during health information exchange activities with partners, and what they need to make the exchange work. CONNECT helps resolve their challenges.

How is CONNECT 4.0 Different?

CONNECT 4.0 offers more flexibility for users through its modular platform, which allows users to pick and choose which components they want to use in their IT environment.

CONNECT 4.0 also allow users to:

• Receive higher message volumes – CONNECT 4.0 can support secure health information flows of 1600+ messages per minute.
• Exchange large files (for the first time) of  up to 1 GB.
• Run CONNECT on additional application servers such as Glassfish, IBM WebSphere, and Oracle WebLogic to meet unique IT environment needs.
• Get more comprehensive event and metric data with improved logging capabilities. Since CONNECT is often used as a gateway in concert with other systems like electronic health records, improved logging allows adopters to integrate CONNECT into whole-system monitoring.
• Determine the state of a transaction across messages to better track and analyze the operations of CONNECT and trading partner gateways.
• Minimize deployment load by supporting a lightweight gateway, which allows for a smaller server footprint and use of system resources.

Learn more about CONNECT 4.0

FHA will be hosting two webinars to demonstrate the new features,  show how CONNECT 4.0 will benefit the health care community and propel national HIE activities, and discuss how CONNECT supports participation in numerous nationwide information exchanges, including eHealth Exchange .

For more information and instructions on how to download  CONNECT 4.0, please visit the CONNECT website:  http://www.connectopensource.org .

Do you have experience using CONNECT? Are you excited to use the new features? We would love to hear your thoughts. Please comment below.