Change can be a good thing, and in a new year, it’s inevitable. With 2020 already well underway, a new Executive Director at our helm, and a few new and potentially game-changing government regulations on the horizon, CommonWell members are embracing it. We asked a few members to share their predictions for interoperability in 2020. Here’s what they had to say:
As a biomedical engineer, former hospital administrator, and Health IT entrepreneur, I’m invested in the power of technology to improve the efficiency of healthcare. It seems to me we particularly need technology that deals with the explosive growth data in data and the types of health care information exchanged – including data from EHRs, as well as devices and consumer apps. The journey to technical and semantic interoperability is long and winding, and in order to keep pace with increasing data volumes coupled with the need for clinical accuracy, we need to scale up our ability to ingest and operate on any kind of data. In the words of French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.’ If we set our sights on the horizon of true semantic interoperability, we can get there.
Eric Rosow, CEO, Diameter Health
At Clinical Architecture, we believe that health IT can provide insights and drive improvement by harnessing and leveraging the patient information we accumulate across all venues of care. Initiatives like TEFCA can help us, as an industry, tackle some of the barriers to realizing these benefits that have existed for decades. In addition, the emphasis on initiatives like TEFCA signal that our industry is coming to understand and accept that the information collected matters. The more we embrace this belief, the more we will strive to not only share information but improve the quality of the information we share. If we can do that, we can transform our industry from one that creates data as a byproduct to one that uses the data we generate to drive continuous improvement.
Charlie Harp, CEO, Clinical Architecture
I do not think TEFCA will magically solve all our interoperability woes, but I do think this is a huge step forward in the right direction…leveraging the Sequoia Project, Carequality and RTI’s joint interoperability expertise, which includes valuable participation from CommonWell and many of its member organizations, to take the various methods of exchange and start bringing them together into one unified “on-ramp” to data exchange.
Alan Swenson, VP of Interoperability, Kno2
While there have been significant advancements over the past decade within the health care interoperability landscape, that has included new regulations and policies, new data standards and technological improvements, the industry continues to be challenged with having access to relevant patient data at the right time in order to provide the highest quality of care at a low cost.
With the dawn of a new year and decade, I look forward to the realization of full interoperability of health care data that includes clinical, claims and social determinants of health – and the achievement of better outcomes for patient populations, providers, payers and all other stakeholders.
Henry Archibong, Associate Vice President, Innovation Solutions, Inovalon
Happy New Year from all of us at CommonWell!