Value Our Work? Please Support It!

Thousands of professionals across programs, systems and domains regularly engage with the National Interoperability Collaborative for its unique cross-sector resources, webinars, projects and relationships. Hundreds of you, individually or through your organizations, are NIC members. In other words, we have succeeded in building the “community of networks” that we envisioned when we launched the NIC […]

It’s Time to Add Prevention to the Fight Against the Opioid Epidemic; New Playbook Focuses on 11 Replicable Strategies to `Go Upstream’

By Daniel Stein and Paul Wormeli There are countless ways to demonstrate the horror of our nation’s opioid crisis, from raw numbers (over 47,600 opioid-related deaths in 2017) to records set (fatal overdoses now exceed vehicular deaths) to OMG descriptions of the drugs’ toxicity. A couple of recent examples: During a routine traffic stop last […]

The Cultural Challenge to Interoperability

By Paul Wormeli Even as there becomes greater acceptance of the need for interoperability across domains and disciplines in order to address serious social problems such as the opioid epidemic, cultural challenges remain as major obstacles to the practical implementation of this concept. One clear case study revealing the obstacles to interoperability can be found […]

A Webinar in the NIC of Time – Insights from the Front Lines: What’s Working (and Not Working) in the Battle against Opioids

In virtually every state of our country, efforts are being mounted to combat the worst public health crisis in modern U.S. history; that is, the opioid epidemic. Some of these initiatives are still in their early stages, while others are relatively advanced and starting to see successes. Regardless of where they are in their development, […]

Learning from 9/11: A New Approach to Fighting the Opioid Crisis

One of the major problems exposed by the tragedy on 9/11 was the inability of government agencies to reach across their silos to share critical information and to coordinate their efforts. To address that potential risk to U.S. national security, Congress voted to establish the Information Sharing Environment, the responsibility of which is to promote […]

Taking Action During Disruptive Times: Two Exciting New SOCI Projects

(With Thanks to Kresge Foundation and Health Information and Management Systems Society) Wherever any of us may fall on the political spectrum, most professionals working to improve the health and well-being of people in our country can probably agree on this: It’s hard to predict how the disparate pieces of the healthcare puzzle will come […]