Making connected care comprehensible
Our mission is to translate the standards behind interoperability into guidance Arizona's health stakeholders can act on — and to carry forward the work begun by Arizona Health-e Connection.
ArizonaOur mission
Our mission
Connected care depends on standards most people never see. AzHeC's mission is to make those standards comprehensible — to take the rules that govern how clinical data is exchanged, identified, secured and reconciled, and explain them plainly enough that the people implementing them can make sound decisions.
Concretely, that means translating HL7 and FHIR (the messaging and API standards behind data exchange), GS1 and UDI (the identifiers behind device and supply tracking), and EPCS and the NCPDP standards behind electronic prescribing — into vendor-neutral guidance Arizona's hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmacies, payers and agencies can use.
Our history
The Arizona Health-e Connection legacy
Arizona's interoperability story began in the mid-2000s, when a statewide executive effort convened a broad community coalition to plan how the state would adopt health information technology. That coalition produced the Arizona Health-e Connection Roadmap, the state's first statewide Health IT Roadmap, and incorporated Arizona Health-e Connection (AzHeC) as a non-profit to drive adoption of health IT and health information exchange.
AzHeC went on to operate "The Network" — Arizona's statewide health information exchange — connecting hospitals, clinics, laboratories and pharmacies so that a patient's clinical information could follow them across the system. Over the following decade the Roadmap was refreshed (a "Roadmap 2.0" era) to chart a sustainable path as the initial federal Health IT funding wound down.
EHR incentives and the push to interoperability
This work did not happen in a vacuum. Under the federal HITECH Act, the EHR Incentive Programs — widely known as "Meaningful Use," and since renamed by CMS to the Promoting Interoperability programs — paid providers and hospitals to adopt and meaningfully use certified electronic health records.
Those incentives drove a generation of EHR adoption; interoperability is the unfinished half of the story. The records exist — the open question, then and now, is how reliably they connect. That is the work AzHeC continues to convene around.
Continue the work
Reach out about council participation, a general enquiry, or press.