Health information exchange (HIE)

Why it matters

Patients are referred between levels of care, and laboratory and imaging services often sit outside the facility that ordered the test. HIE lets results, referrals and summaries reach the clinician who needs them. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology uses the term both for the appropriate and confidential electronic exchange of clinical information among authorised organisations and for an organisation that provides exchange services under agreed rules [1].

Key points

• Common patterns are directed exchange between known parties, query based exchange to look up a record, and exchange mediated by the patient.
• OpenHIE describes an interoperability layer that receives requests from facility systems and routes them to shared registries and records [2].
• Exchange relies on standards such as HL7 v2 messages, FHIR resources and DICOM for images [3].
• Governance, consent and audit carry as much weight as the technology.

In Moana

Moana supports FHIR R4, SMART on FHIR app launch, FHIR bulk export, HL7 v2 and DICOM, with consent for sharing and a full audit log, as described on the interoperability page.

Sources

1. What is health information exchange?, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, accessed 2026
2. OpenHIE architecture specification: overview of the architecture, OpenHIE, 2024
3. HL7 Version 2 product description, HL7 International, accessed 2026