Interoperability

More than 70 percent of respondents ranked biometrics, such as fingerprinting and facial recognition, as the top choice for a unique identifier while hospital executives raised some questions.

Facilities earn the designation by using technology to optimize patient care, including EHRs, HIE, analytics, clinical decision support and more.

A confluence of efforts from policymakers and tech companies – EHR vendors and consumer giants alike – have set the stage for HL7's interoperability standard to have a breakout year.

Boston Children’s Hospital and MedStar Health Research Institute will use the LEAP in Health IT funding to develop new interoperability applications for clinical workflow and pop health.

APIs are a great start, but so much more goes into building an app and winning customers.

Artesia General Hospital stays focused on building partnerships where it can, optimizing its EHR and enhancing patient and physician experience.

The NHS journey to interoperability is hampered by cultural resistance and its traditional capacity for building large legacy data silos. But while for many hospitals and trusts it remains a fraught work in progress, some projects are now cracking the interoperability puzzle, reaping the benefits and seeing the impact as more data sources are brought in from the cold.

HIMSS on Friday issued a call to the healthcare industry to take action in battling the ongoing opioid crisis in America by using health information and technology. While reported opioid drug overdoses killed more than 42,000 Americans in 2016 and nearly 48,000 in 2017, both tech and policy must align in the fight. Specifically, HIMSS recommended four ways: 1. Leverage Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs). A number of states and hospitals are already working on PDMPs to reduce opioid misuse and abuse, beginning with only prescribing opioids when entirely appropriate in the first place. They’re also tracking all prescription data with the aim of preventing avoidable deaths by overdose, allergies or drug-drug interactions. 2. Equip health workers on the front lines of battle against opioids with interoperable electronic health information. HIMSS said this will enable clinicians to make better decisions and, in turn,  more effectively engage patients as partners. 3. Use secure, interoperable technology across the care continuum. This includes integrating acute care, addiction and mental health data, counseling and community support, outpatient services and public health. 4.  Leverage today’s tech advances to appropriately and securely share information across disciplines. Doing so could enable “law enforcement, social services, behavioral health, healthcare, and public health departments to give care where it’s needed and better understand prescribing patterns, overdose rates and movement of the epidemic.” The HIMSS call comes days before its CEO, Hal Wolf, is scheduled to present on the crisis Monday, Sept. 24, at the Canada-U.S. Roundtable on Strategies to Combat the Opioid Crisis in Washington, D.C. Wolf will present the Honorable Mary Taylor, lieutenant governor of Ohio and the Honorable Margaret “Maggie” Hassan, senator of New Hampshire, who are on the front lines of fighting the epidemic in their respective states. HIMSS is the parent organization of Healthcare IT News. Twitter: @SusanJMorse Email the writer: susan.morse@himssmedia.com

And there’s already one in the JASON Report from 2014 that was eclipsed by the industry’s excitement about open APIs.

CareCloud and Google on Tuesday announced that CareCloud is joining the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program. CareCloud said it will use Google’s Healthcare API to extend its interoperability, patient experience, and practice management services to ambulatory customers. In a steady stream of developments, Google and rivals Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft are gearing up next-generation cloud offerings and research firm Black Book predicted recently that 30 percent of practices will replace their electronic health record within three years and the majority of those are investigating cloud options. CareCloud Chief Technology Officer Josh Siegel explained that aligning with Google enables the company to bring economies of scale to providers for addressing problems unique to ambulatory medicine, even those physician groups aligned with an ACO of clinically integrated network, in a way it otherwise could not. "We are both focused on interoperability and machine learning to improve clinical quality and practice efficiency," Siegel said. "We at CareCloud believe this will add unique perspective that can be combined with the work Google is doing with research hospitals and health systems to bring these new capabilities to the hands of providers." Google Cloud, for instance, joined the National Institutes of Health Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, or STRIDES Initiative, in July to help NIH unlock large biomedical datasets for researchers. That announcement came during the same week that former Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD, joined Google Cloud as an advisor to the health and life sciences team. Twitter: SullyHIT Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com