Interoperability

The EHR giant released the team of health IT vendors in addition to Accenture and Leidos that will help support Veterans Affairs’ transition from its legacy VistA EHR to the $16 billion Cerner platform.

InterSystems has announced a new data and collaboration platform to enable application developers to more easily and efficiently access health data. The aim is to help healthcare organizations be more agile and effective in creating and scaling innovative apps. WHY IT MATTERS Healthcare is generating more digital data than ever before, but the enormous volume and variety of that information can also be overwhelming. IRIS for Health, a healthcare-specific offshoot of InterSystems' new IRIS Data Platform, seeks to offer a streamlined approach for developers to access and make use of that data, officials say – giving them analytics and interoperability tools to help in the creation of apps. To do this, the platform leverages HL7's fast-becoming-ubiquitous Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard – including FHIR Server and SMART on FHIR capabilities. It also supports all major interoperability standards and certifications (HL7 Versions 2 and 3, Consolidated CDA, IHE, DICOM, and others), as well as an extensible data model enabling transitions between those standards. THE BIGGER TREND New and innovative clinical applications – cloud-based decision support, mobile tools for patients, AI-powered analytics  – are proliferating everywhere, and fast becoming key enablers of care transformation. But for all the creative energy in the app ecosystem, the raw materials available to forward-thinking developers could be improved As we showed in our Focus on Innovation this past month, there's boundless great ideas out there, and while the basic infrastructure is there to enable developers' success, startups and upstarts in the app creation space need the larger industry to be thinking as creatively as they are. And as hospitals and health systems look to scale up their own IT innovations, moving them from pilot to production, InterSystems hopes its new platform, available starting in 2019, will enable them to realize these innovations faster and more efficiently. ON THE RECORD "The explosion of healthcare data has created a dire need for innovations that can help the industry keep pace with payer, provider, and patient expectations," said Don Woodlock, vice president of HealthShare at InterSystems, in a statement. "Healthcare needs a foundational data platform that enables cutting-edge applications to rapidly evolve from concept to reality," he added. "We’re helping healthcare developers bring applications from whiteboard to production faster." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

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