NEW YORK – A three-state prototype for a national healthcare information network has successfully exchanged information among separate networks in each state.

Connecting for Health, the collaborative of more than 100 organizations that built the prototype, called the exchange a “milestone.”

The participating networks included ones operating in Boston, Indianapolis and Mendocino County, Calif.

“We demonstrated that it is possible to link our network with two very different community networks in other parts of the United States,” said John Halamka, CEO of MA-SHARE and an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“As an emergency physician, I am confident that a connected electronic healthcare system will save thousands of lives each year by enabling authorized clinicians to retrieve the complete medical histories of critically ill patients in a matter of seconds and thus avoid major medical errors,” Halamka added.

The project is managed by the New York-based Markle Foundation and funded by Markle and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The tests used a specially developed Record Locator Service rather than a single patient identifier. The locator service does not store any clinical data centrally. Instead, it identifies the location of records wherever they are stored.

The groups in the three states used 20 million medical records to test hundreds of thousands of exchanges. The records were real, but were given fake names and other identifying characteristics to protect patient privacy.

The success rate for receiving the records requested was in the high 90th percentile, Halamka said. In no instance did a doctor receive an incorrect record, he added.

“We’ve shown that it’s possible to build a decentralized network,” said Clay Shirky, who directs the technical work for Connecting for Health and is a member of the adjunct faculty at New York University. “With that demonstration we can now move to thinking about moving to non-regional networks,” he said. “We can now imagine ways of connecting these networks together.”

Carol Diamond, MD, managing director of the Markle Foundation and chairwoman of Connecting for Health said the collaborative would release in the spring additional details, standards, technical specifications and codes used in developing the common framework that enabled the data exchange.

“This model underscores that our goal to enable healthcare providers and communities to improve patient care through private and secure health information sharing is close at hand,” said Diamond. Moreover, she said, the tests proved the theory that data exchange could occur without a national identifier.