It may be helpful as you read this to use your highlighter on the screen to accentuate the important parts or some white-out for the parts you don’t favor.
Do you ever kick an idea around, speaking about it, writing about it, until at some point you finally capture it in a way that makes sense to you? That’s how I reason things through. I write like I’m talking aloud and sometimes it lands in my lap.
That just happened to me as I was trying to get my arms around what it is about the concept of the RHIOs that has been bothering me. Bear with me. I was on LinkedIn emailing someone using the ‘send a message’ feature. I was returning an email which she was returning which I had initiated. The process works like this. I get an email from LinkedIn telling me I have a message. I go to LinkedInm read the message and send a reply via LinkedIn. She receives an email indicating she has a message, goes to LinkedIn, and so forth and so on.
Do you see it? In this scenario, what is the added value provided by LinkedIn? Nothing. It’s all hat and no cowboy. LinkedIn serves simply as a pass through, contributing nothing. I wrote in my message to her, “Send me your email address, I feel like I’m in my own RHIO.”
When is a RHIO not aRHIO? When there’s no need for it. Is there any functionality intended for the hundreds of RHIOs which couldn’t be dealt with at the N-HIN? What do you think?
Pale Rhino Consulting 
Ah, but remember when RHIOs were all the rage? They had their time and place. Would be be where we are with NHIN without the RHIO experience?
The same holds true of LinkedIn. It has its function as a conduit, and the networks that have evolved because of it certainly have value. RHIOs helped force hospitals and health systems to start having the data governance and data sharing conversations that needed to happen before NHIN could be imagined.
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Thank you for commenting. I apologize for the late response, I only just now saw it.
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