CalRHIO Summit III convened in San Francisco yesterday with plenty of deserved accolades. The first remarkable thing about this newly independent, nonprofit organization with 19 board members is that it is barely a year old. The second thing is the respect and traction it is getting. While nearly 100 healthcare leaders attended Summit II in October 2005, the February 2006 summit registered 180 attendees. As an umbrella organization taking on statewide duties, CalRHIO has already achieved many of its objectives, namely getting everybody together, developing a Web site for information exchange, creating an inventory of health information exchanges and adhering to transparency by conducting open meetings and posting its work on its Web site. While many speakers acknowledged that technology is the easy piece to connectivity, the human factor is as critical as it is thorny. Molly Coye, MD, CEO of HealthTech and chair of CalRHIO’s steering group and planning committee, said that the key difference between the ill-fated CHINs of the past and RHIOs--particularly CalRHIO--is that “people stayed at the table despite differences” because “trust was the glue that bound them together.” Trust allows collaboration, and collaboration is definitely a common thread throughout CalRHIO efforts. Jo Ellen Ross, CEO of Lumetra and the first chair of CalRHIO’s board, stressed the importance of participation by summit attendees and their colleagues, organizations and communities. “We can improve the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare in our state by doing three things,” she said. Keep the vision of allowing medical information to follow the patient at the forefront, exhibit leadership to get everybody to work toward the common vision and engender cooperation by all stakeholders. These three objectives are driving CalRHIO’s current efforts. The organization is tracking what’s happening nationally in areas where California needs work to avoid reinventing the wheel. But where there are no results, CalRHIO is tasked to create results. It is working on recommended standards for California that are aligned with national efforts, building a technology infrastructure incrementally, developing criteria for ranking personal health record products and implementing a pilot program to link ERs. CalRHIO is also building a business case by analyzing potential benefits and costs, and to whom those benefits and costs accrue, so that stakeholders can be asked to contribute in proportion. Everyone acknowledged the difficult journey ahead and the “cautious optimism” that informs the organization’s actions. Its ambition and shared vision, however, are anything but cautious and these traits are putting CalRHIO on the national map as the statewide organization to learn from.