Bill Siwicki

The EHR vendor and analytics company sign an agreement to facilitate greater clinical insights for caregivers within the records system.

Humana subsidiary says the three apps use the HealthLogix technology platform to tackle population health, patient engagement and mobile health.

As part of its ongoing efforts to help healthcare provider organizations enhance their IT strategies and better realize value from their IT investments, HIMSS Analytics is unveiling at HIMSS16 the Next EMRAM Criteria and Value Score. EMRAM is HIMSS Analytics’ Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model. And Value Score is described by HIMSS Analytics as healthcare’s first international quality measurement for the value of health IT – building on the EMRAM and HIMSS’ Value Suite – to help providers optimize and use IT to improve clinical and financial outcomes and drive efficiencies in care. The Next EMRAM Criteria is a major update to EMRAM. HIMSS Analytics is shifting some existing technologies and practices down its seven-stage ladder, moving new ones in, better accounting for differences in the delivery of healthcare around the world, and adding significant new material centered on security. HIMSS Analytics is launching the Next EMRAM Criteria at HIMSS16, but added that it still is working through details on some of the revised criteria. “It’s been an exhaustive process: gathering feedback from the provider, administrative health and vendor communities around the world, but by and large the criteria is fundamentally inked. The intent is to create a true global comparison,” said Blain Newton, executive vice president at HIMSS Analytics. “The previous EMRAM was built 10 years ago, and while it became an effective tool and an industry standard – to the point where bond rating agencies ask for proof of Stage 7 – medicine is practiced differently in different parts of the world, and EMRAM initially was pretty specific to North America.” Newton said the Next EMRAM Criteria reflects the current state of the market, so things that were cutting edge 10 years ago now are moved down the scale and emerging practices and technologies have been moved in at different stages. For example, picture archiving and communication systems, which were not as commonplace 10 years ago as they are today, have been moved down to an earlier stage, while such things as clinician documentation and business continuity services have been given new emphasis. “And we’ve added a significant amount of material around privacy and security, which was a missing piece for us,” Newton said. “It’s a big update to the original criteria. But health systems performing well now will still be performing well with the rollout of the Next EMRAM Criteria.” Also at HIMSS16, HIMSS Analytics is officially launching Value Score, the next generation of several HIMSS-developed standards and resources that have served as health IT adoption models for providers over the last decade. EMRAM, for instance, has helped hospitals and clinical practices track and benchmark EHR adoption and utilization goals, and the HIMSS Health IT Value Suite and Value STEPS have provided a framework and vocabulary for providers to articulate strategies. As the market continues to evolve, Value Score will give providers a way to look at their entire organization and capture a comprehensive view of how they achieve value beyond the electronic health record, HIMSS Analytics said. “Value Score is the capstone to all of the offerings,” Newton said. “The other models focus on the adoption and implementation of technology. Value Score is focused on the optimization of that technology to achieve and realize value. It is an objective measure of discrete examples of realizing clinical, financial and patient engagement satisfaction, and realizing value by leveraging IT. We’re not only looking to get to Stage 7, but also to optimize and use IT to truly improve care, reduce costs and increase satisfaction. Value Score is a way to capture and normalize that concept.” While Value Score measures what is happening today, room has been made for innovation, Newton added, including a score specific to that topic. “We looked to the folks in the vanguard doing things we haven’t seen before,” he said. “The purpose of Value Score’s innovation score is to push the market forward, so eventually innovation filters down into the core model, which then can evolve and help those not in the vanguard to achieve more and raise the bar for everybody." HIMSS Analytics is in booth 1054 on the Exhibit Hall floor. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT  This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

New tool analyzes data to pinpoint care gaps and identify service lines where patients are seeking care elsewhere. 

The new tool builds on the SAP Foundation for Health platform by enabling third-parties to build apps for very specific use cases, like diabetes management, prescription fulfillment or non-adherence issues. 

The vendor said it can create a ‘golden record’ by combining the new tool with its data warehouse to give payers, providers and patients more complete information. 

The new app mimics the Uber set-up, with certified interpreters standing by to come to a hospital and help interpret languages between caregivers and patients.

The hardware and software combination brings a touchscreen UI and the company integrated it with medical grade sensors. 

The proliferation of patient portals offered by provider organizations has created significant usability challenges for patients while providers are feeling pressure to integrate portals to improve service quality, enhance workflow and provide a more unifying experience to patients. “The rising interest in and demand for patient-facing tools, especially patient portals, has attracted to the market a number of different vendor approaches and consumer-focused patient health record offerings designed to meet various situation-specific provider and patient needs,” said Santosh Mohan, a management fellow in IT transformation in the office of the CIO at Stanford Health Care who previously served as a senior consultant at The Advisory Board Company. Mohan stresses his opinions are his own and do not reflect those of Stanford Health Care. “Interoperability challenges and the lack of a centrally envisioned strategy for making these tools available to patients are resulting in a landscape where health information is increasingly available online, but spread broadly across the portals of various care settings and organizations that own the data.” [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] As a result, patients increasingly are being challenged to interact with multiple portals, often making it more difficult for them to be effective participants in their own care, and providers are facing the need to integrate portals to improve service quality, enhance workflow and provide a more unifying experience to patients in order to compete for consumers, Mohan explained. “Curbing ‘portal sprawl’ and rethinking patient engagement techniques to bring them up to par with consumer online experiences from other industries is no easy feat – it requires providers to cautiously navigate a complex vendor landscape and carefully evaluate ways to streamline patient experience, all without compromising functionality, usage and existing levels of patient acceptance,” he added. Mohan will deliver a presentation titled “Too Many Patient Portals – What Can You Do About It” on Tuesday, March 1, 2016, at HIMSS16. The session will be in the Sands Expo Convention Center in Galileo 1004. “My session’s objective is to surface some emerging approaches that provider organizations are pursuing to integrate patient portals across various care settings within their enterprises, and to weigh the pros and cons of these approaches,” Mohan said. “This is a roundtable session, so I will get participants to share their challenges and goals with respect to their portal-related efforts and to surface some best practices. The goal is to discuss how we can make portals accessible in a meaningful way and be effective at the same time.” Mohan suggested one big takeaway from the session will be attendees gaining a better understanding that organizations should plan portal strategies for the long-term but remain flexible in the near-term. “The immediate value of offering a quick, integrated view of a patient’s health profile must be balanced with the ultimate goal of morphing a portal into an advanced and engaging tool for the patient,” Mohan said. “Ultimately, a portal should act like a health-GPS, providing patients with situation-relevant content, navigating them back to health, and helping them stay on course. The challenge for provider organizations is how to bring this vision to life.” Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Medical image exchange platform vendor lifeIMAGE has inked a 10-year deal with clinical image viewer maker Client Outlook to make Client Outlook’s visualization platform a core component of the lifeIMAGE offering. Client Outlook’s FDA Class II diagnostic and clinical imaging viewing solution eUnity will become the default viewer across all apps and services on the lifeIMAGE enterprise image exchange platform, which links to providers and patients. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] Client Outlook will be at lifeIMAGE booth 968 at HIMSS16 demonstrating eUnity on lifeIMAGE workstations. The lifeIMAGE technology is a hybrid local network sharing system with a cloud component to share studies outside of a provider network. Client Outlook is a universal viewer for video and still imaging in cardiology, radiology, oncology, pediatrics, emergency medicine, burn care, dermatology and other fields. “We wanted our customers to have assured availability to viewing technology of today backed by an organization sharing the same commitment we’ve shown to future innovation and interoperability,” said Matthew A. Michela, CEO and president of lifeIMAGE. Client Outlook and lifeIMAGE will collaborate to ensure the interoperability of image data across their services. Client Outlook will introduce a workflow that enables the fast transmission of studies and clinical information displayed on its viewer through the lifeIMAGE network, and lifeIMAGE is now the only major image exchange provider offering enterprise access to the eUnity universal viewer. “In partnership with lifeIMAGE we see the clear opportunity to significantly improve image data interoperability while improving physician workflow and clinical outcomes,” said Steve Rankin, president and CEO of Client Outlook. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.