Michigan Already Built the Infrastructure for This. It's Called MiHIN.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can point to isn't a new idea. It's an existing one, already funded, already working, sitting one domain over from the problem you're trying to solve.

Michigan has a statewide health information exchange called MiHIN — the Michigan Health Information Network. Its entire purpose is solving a specific, hard problem: getting many independent organizations (hospitals, health systems, pharmacies, providers) to share information about the same person, reliably, across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

That is, functionally, the exact problem discoverability infrastructure for autism and disability services has never solved. Families rely on Facebook groups and word of mouth because no equivalent system exists connecting schools, nonprofits, and community programs the way MiHIN connects healthcare organizations.

A few things about MiHIN are worth knowing. It launched in 2010 with federal seed funding, and it's governed as a nonprofit public-private partnership — the State of Michigan, regional health exchanges, hospital systems, and payers all participate, alongside a Governor-appointed Health IT Commission. That mixed structure has kept it running for over fifteen years, which is longer than most single-funder programs survive.

Here's the detail that matters most for anyone thinking about building new infrastructure in this space: MiHIN already has a stated pathway for community-based organizations — including schools — to participate in its data-sharing framework, extending care coordination into the community. That's not a hypothetical. It's an existing door.

MiHIN even has a formal process, called the Use Case Factory, for proposing new categories of data-sharing to be built into the network — with a public intake portal open to ideas from any source.

I'm not announcing a partnership. I haven't made contact yet. I'm naming this because it's a rare thing: proof, in your own state, that the underlying problem — many organizations, one family, no shared system — is solvable, funded, and has been running successfully for a decade and a half. Whatever gets built for discoverability in disability services doesn't have to invent that wheel. It might just have to walk through a door that's already open.