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Where is Interoperability Going?

When health IT professionals head to HIMSS, interoperability will be a major issue, as it has been for many years. Various interoperability solutions are always on the horizon, but never quite come to fruition. The reasons go beyond technological capabilities; healthcare organizations and IT vendors have simply not been able to think outside the box of their preconceived notions.

A classic example is the recent announcement by a very large EHR vendor of new enhancements to its interoperability solution that allow providers who use that EHR to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Now, it’s all to the good that a clinician in one healthcare system will be able to not only view patient data in a different system’s EHR, but will also be able to schedule appointments more efficiently and message providers in the other healthcare system about a particular patient.

However, a user of that EHR will still not know that a patient got a flu shot at CVS or was admitted to a hospital ED that doesn’t have that EHR. In fact, except for the exchange of hard-to-parse clinical summary documents, the provider won’t know about anything that happened to the patient in care settings with disparate EHRs.

The central problem here is that the major health IT vendors would like their customers to use only their products and no one else’s. They’ve managed to convince some organizations that “rip and replace” is the solution to their interoperability ills. It is, however, no panacea. Aside from being a very expensive approach that disrupts the organization for a year or more, a unity system cannot provide all the functionality that healthcare organizations need, and the big vendors are not very amenable to connecting with third party app vendors.

The advent of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) promises to allow EHR users to expand their functionality through third party apps without having to pay for special interfaces. To their credit, the big vendors have shown some flexibility by letting outside vendors play in their digital sandboxes and develop FHIR-based apps. However, the majority of these apps are being used mainly for viewing EHR data. Moreover, FHIR has still not solved the problem of EHR-to-EHR interoperability.

So what is to be done? I’d suggest that, for starters, ONC and the private consortia working on interoperability consider a different role for EHRs that was suggested by Mandl and Kohane in a New England Journal of Medicine article. In that piece, the authors predict that with the spread of open standard software APIs, EHRs might become commodity components in a larger platform that includes other transactional systems and data warehouses running myriad apps. These apps could have access to many sources of shared data beyond a single health system’s records.

To visualize what this means, think about all the apps you have on your smartphone. Many of these apps work together. For example, Uber uses your GPS to figure out your location, as do shopping and movie apps. Your calendar app knows what time it is in your time zone.

If an EHR could contextualize all of the data coming into it from different apps, and combine them in ways that support medical decision making, it would be a much more useful program. It would maintain its role as the center of clinical workflow and documentation, but outside apps could also improve those functions, making the EHR more usable for clinicians.

That’s all very fine, and the same system might be used to expose EHR data to apps that consumers could use to monitor and maintain their health. But how do we achieve interoperability between EHRs?

I don’t presume to have the answer, but I have a couple of suggestions. First, health information exchanges need to step up their efforts to link together healthcare providers that use different EHRs. Some HIEs have focused on providing more analytic support to customers, which is certainly important but doesn’t meet the need to make a broad range of outside data available within the EHR workflow. To the extent that HIEs expand the types of data they can exchange, they will become more valuable. And if they adopt the emerging FHIR-based APIs, they will eventually find ways to exchange relevant data at the granular data level.

Interoperability at a granular, discrete data level must move beyond interfaces between disparate systems, which are too expensive to set up and maintain. The holy grail would be to develop the ability for EHRs to generate some kind of standard data set far more extensive than today’s CCDAs that would be both machine readable and understandable to clinicians using any other system. Perhaps FHIR could do that someday, but it would still require some kind of universal network to distribute the data. Maybe blockchain or some other secure peer-to-peer system will meet this challenge.

That’s all my crystal ball shows me today. But if the past is any indication, something totally unknown lies outside the box of the future.

4medica Reengages Amendola Communications for Content Creation and Public Relations

MARINA DEL REY, CA and SCOTTSDALE, AZ Nov. 1, 2017–Amendola Communications, an award-winning healthcare marketing and public relations agency, is pleased to welcome back 4medica, the market leader in moving clinical data in real time across the healthcare continuum, to its customer family. Amendola has previously served as 4medica’s public relations agency of record. In this newest engagement, Amendola will produce quality content and provide additional public relations support.

The reengagement is a timely one as 4medica pivots from being identified largely with its top ranking laboratory and imaging connectivity solutions, to broader recognition as an expert in real time clinical data integration and data management accuracy with its highly patented and innovative Big Data MPI.

“We know from experience there is no agency better suited or more familiar with the healthcare IT space– to help amplify our positioning than Amendola,” said Gregory Church, President, 4medica.

Church added, “Jodi Amendola and her team also have a strong commitment to client service that has proven to help us quickly act on important opportunities.”

Beyond static electronic health records to true clinical data interoperability

In a diversified health IT field, 4medica has earned its position as one of the leading clinical data exchange vendors. The company has seen firsthand the need for the fluid flow of data throughout the healthcare organization, without sacrificing data accuracy, quality and security.

To that end, 4medica offers an expansive portfolio of solutions for health systems, hospitals, laboratories, imaging centers, health information exchanges (HIEs), accountable care organizations (ACOs), health plans and other diagnostic care organizations. These solutions include:

  • ClinXdata, a powerful platform for clinical data exchange
  • 4medica Big Data MPI, which performs patient identity matching at unprecedented speed and scale
  • Revenue cycle management services to make lab orders management a revenue-generating function

All 4medica solutions reside in a highly secure cloud environment that adheres to HIPAA’s stringent data security and privacy standards. This is of particular importance for healthcare data that is rapidly becoming digital.

“We are so pleased to be working with 4medica again, a company that has been at the forefront of healthcare data’s digital transformation. We look forward to helping 4medica create and promote content that memorably articulates its value proposition to a variety of healthcare audiences,” said Jodi Amendola, CEO of Amendola.

Amendola will deliver a range of content from bylined articles and informative briefs to press releases and award application abstracts–that highlights 4medica’s thought leadership and expertise. Amendola will also provide public relations to promote 4medica’s newsworthy events and milestones.

About 4medica
4medica provides the industry’s leading SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) big data MPI, clinical data exchange and integration platform to help healthcare organizations of diverse types create a seamless view of the patient care experience and help further drive better health outcomes. The clinical data exchange platform integrates with and builds upon disparate systems to facilitate interoperable data exchange across various care settings to promote care continuity. The cloud computing model is scalable, lower cost, maintenance-free, easy to use and deployable in a few months or less, eliminating large capital outlays or resource utilization. This is especially critical for hospitals and physician health organizations of all types and sizes. 4medica connects hundreds of institutional facilities including hospitals, health systems, physicians, laboratories, radiology centers and pathology clinics. More than 35,000 physicians use its solutions every day. Learn more at www.4medica.com and www.bigdatampi.com.

Media Contact: Marcia Rhodes | mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com | 602-793-1561