The North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, Inc. (NCHICA) is a nonprofit consortium of over 250 organizations dedicated to improving healthcare through information technology and secure communications. NCHICA members include: hospitals and clinics, medical and dental practices, professional societies and nonprofit associations, national, state and local health agencies, health plans, law firms, healthcare and IT consulting firms/vendors, health education and training providers, pharmaceutical and research organizations.  Click here for more information.

The North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, Inc. (NCHICA), as an established and trusted neutral party in North Carolina, is bringing together a diverse set of provider, employer, health plan, state government and technology partners to demonstrate the benefits of health information exchange (HIE) in a rural community. The tools, strategies and lessons learned from our collaborative will help other communities develop and build their own local health information infrastructure and ultimately advance the development of a national health information infrastructure.

The North Carolina Community Medication Management Project seeks to demonstrate that healthcare quality, safety and efficiency can be improved by: 1) providing clinicians with a patient's medication history electronically at the point of care, and 2) integrating this information with the automated refill and e-prescribing process.

NCHICA has been operating for ten years and is recognized nationally for its efforts to promote the use of information technology in healthcare. In two of our previous demonstration projects, the North Carolina Emergency Department Database and Provider Access to Immunization Registry Securely, we demonstrated our ability to create strong collaborations. For the Community Medication Management Project we have brought together diverse organizations, many of which are "competitors" that have never worked together, to advance HIE in a small rural community. We believe our project will be successful because it involves many major stakeholders in the HIE arena, has excellent support from the local community, and employs a technical architecture that is standards-based, scalable and replicable.