Health Information Exchange: Making a Difference

Across the country, U.S. states and territories have been working with ONC to develop and implement Health Information Exchange (HIE), the ability for authorized health care providers to securely share real-time information electronically. HIE helps facilitate care coordination, avoid repeating tests and procedures, shift the burden of relaying medical histories from the patient to providers, and ensure that all of a patient's health care providers have more complete information.

[weihuang]

HIE is a small part of internet. Just a flatform to share health imformation, like TED to share ideas.

[timnoir]

My question is simple: Why do we need a different network called HIE, when we already have the Internet?

And don't tell me for security reasons. The banking industry has been using the Internet for decades with no major security problems.