It was when Wendy Wolf, MD, talked about the fisherman brought into the emergency room after suffering a stroke on Casco Bay, or the skier unconscious after an accident on the slopes of Sugarloaf, or the woman in the doctor’s office who can’t remember when she last had a mammogram, that brought home just how essential the exchange of information among hospitals and physicians can be.

Wolf, a pediatric heart doctor, no longer practices medicine. She heads the Maine Health Access Foundation, whose mission is, as its name implies, promoting affordable and high-quality healthcare for all Maine residents. The foundation contributed $1 million to the startup of HealthInfoNet, a statewide health information exchange, or HIE, and Wolf continues to be a key player in its operations.

“We’re talking about transformational change, and we’re willing to put big money on the table,” Wolf said when the foundation announced the grant in 2008.

The exchange is live and its leaders like to point out that it is the largest statewide HIE in the country that uses clinical data. So far, it connects 15 hospitals across the state and 2,000 physicians.

In Maine, the healthcare community came to the table in what Wolf called “a spontaneous partnership.” And consumers and privacy advocates were involved from the get go. There was, and continues to be, plenty of political will and financial will – and vision.

HealthInfoNet leaders clearly revel in their considerable accomplishment, and they had a chance to show off their baby, so to speak, when the top healthcare IT man in the country came to town to deliver a keynote talk about what the federal government was up to on the healthcare IT front.

The group arranged for David Blumenthal, MD, the national coordinator for healthcare IT, to tour Maine Medical Center and see firsthand how HealthInfoNet works. Blumenthal seemed duly impressed, and he said he was grateful for the example.

As he had mentioned earlier in the day, the federal government can’t do it all. Leadership has to be local, he said.

So all eyes were on Maine for the moment on July 30, or so it seemed. And Maine is truly unique.

The state, known for its rock-bound coast, charming villages and Maine woods, spans 33,215 square miles of mostly rural communities, with many of its hospitals, medical groups and clinics scattered wide across the state. It includes New Gloucester, a farming community with about 4,800 people and an office campus where the MedTech Publishing Company produces Healthcare IT News and Healthcare Finance News.

We admit to a bias.

But lest this be an ode to Maine’s initiative, vision and perseverance on the healthcare IT front, we know that every statewide or regional HIE effort has its own unique story to tell.

Just as it is in Maine, the HIE bottom line is about saving lives.

In the last month alone, there has been news about health information exchanges in Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts and Nebraska.

Blumenthal summed it best while on his Maine tour: “Your example makes clear what power there is in local leadership. Each local institution, each local community, each local provider of care has to go through their own struggles.”