Jack McCarthy

Execs will point to specific examples where interoperability has worked in other industries and what healthcare can learn from how well those scale.

OpenNotes is emerging as one of the most promising applications in the national movement toward more effectively engaging patients with a range of technologies including EHRs, mobile software, telehealth tools. And it is proving especially useful in the data liberation revolution.  “Medical care is very expensive and the information in medical records should belong to the patients,” said Homer Chin, MD, the physician champion for the Northwest OpenNotes Consortium. “This opens the record up for them and gives them access to their own information. So it’s really about greater transparency of the healthcare system.” The Northwest OpenNotes Consortium is a group working to implement Open Notes across all health systems in Oregon and the Portland Metro region. See all of our HIMSS16 previews Initial studies of OpenNotes usage have shown that patients felt more engaged in their care and that they were more likely to take medicine as prescribed, Chin said. Seventy-five percent reported taking better care of themselves, better understanding of their medical conditions, and were better prepared for visits. They felt more in control of their care and said that availability of OpenNotes would affect their future choice of providers. “They felt closer to their providers and more engaged with their medical care with the ability to see these notes,” Chin said.  Another potential benefit of OpenNotes is its promise to make medical care more efficient and less expensive. “Our gut sense is it probably will but that remains to be seen because we don’t have the hard data,” Chin said. “If people are on the same page, they won’t be reordering tests, won’t be redoing things. The patient will be more engaged and will understand what’s going on to a greater extent. But data hasn’t been gathered yet.” [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Early concerns about OpenNotes from physicians about it taking up more time for doctors and patients were allayed with use of the technology. “In our experience, when organizations go live with OpenNotes the predominant thing we hear from physicians is it was a non-event,” Chin said. “When the functionality was implemented, hardly anything was heard from the patients and doctors. In general, after implementing OpenNotes, physicians turned out to be very supportive and found it to be very helpful.”  Chin’s session, "OpenNotes and the Northwest OpenNotes Consortium," is slated for Tuesday March 1, 2016 from 10 to 11 a.m. in the Sands Expo Convention Center room Lando 4201. Twitter: @HealthITNews 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.

Agile development, once the domain of software developers, is being put to work at Intermountain Healthcare, as CIO Marc Probst and his team are rapidly building programs throughout clinical settings. “We are rolling it out and configuring it within the entire organization,” Probst said. “We’re applying it not just to software development but as an integration within the organization.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews The agile method -- in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing teams -- promises to deliver programs much more quickly and better meet the needs of healthcare providers. Probst and Jeff Townsend, executive vice president at Cerner, have been collaborating on just such an approach. And the two will present in a session on March 2 at HIMSS16 titled “What IT Takes to Succeed.” “With traditional IT approaches, you make a selection for a piece of software – for example a departmental imaging system – and you hand it to IT to implement,” Townsend said. “In the agile model, we start not as software-centric but as workflow-centric. We include process judgements, with short cycle times and we initiate prototypes and empower leaders to participate. So there is a continuous ‘show me’ element.”  Cerner, Intermountain and 400 Intermountain physicians collaborated in 2015 to apply agile development principles to design and configure an electronic health record, practice management and revenue cycle system at two Intermountain hospitals and 24 clinics across northern Utah. Teams used agile development principles to design and configure the system in six-week cycles. Probst and Townsend will outline how to recognize challenges of agile development and how to overcome them. They will also show how to identify the tools needed to implement data-driven, agile cultures within other parts of the organization. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Townsend said the new agile development approach is changing how organizations operate.  “This isn’t the CIO picking the system out,” he explained. “It’s the clinical and business leadership putting it into the organization – which is incredibly more powerful.” Their session, “What IT Takes to Succeed,” is scheduled for March 2 from 1 – 2 p.m. in the Sands Expo Convention Center Sands Showroom. Twitter: @HealthITNews 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.

While the Republican candidates mostly spar over how they will repeal Obamacare, Democrats say they would build on the existing reform.

ESET researcher Stephen Cobb will explain at HIMSS16 why CIOs and CISOs should think of their organization like a patient and address the most urgent problems first.

 Terry Fairbanks will outline advances, challenges to more effectively tuning systems and software for patients and caregivers.

The onset of cloud computing brought with it an information technology revolution, allowing organizations to have their IT resources hosted off site, reducing their costs and simplifying operations. Unfortunately, the move to the cloud did not mean organizations could forget about requirements for a successful security profile. Healthcare organizations making the move to a cloud-centric strategy can’t lower their guard on security defenses, said Chris Bowen, founder and chief privacy and security officer of ClearDATA, a healthcare cloud computing company. “People may think that by offloading security responsibility to the cloud, they won’t have to worry, but that’s not the case,” Bowen said. “We know that threats exist in the cloud.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews Bowen will discuss this issue at HIMSS16 along with J. Gary Seay, senior vice president and CIO of Community Health Systems, Bowen will give a presentation entitled, “Developing a Cloud Security Roadmap." Bowen and Seay will look at the specific security problems facing healthcare organizations, which often rank behind retail and financial organizations in creating hardened, multi-layered approaches. The session will show how to develop a cloud security roadmap that can eliminate the main causes of data breaches using a "Defense in Depth" multi-layered approach to security. The discussion will also look at how a provider enterprise can develop a defense strategy that hardens security at seven distinct layers: physical; network; application; server; data; devices; and users. If done right, cloud technology enables organizations to take advantage of many layers of security, which may range from data encryption to threat management, and drive accelerated compliance, cost savings and data analytics for healthcare organizations. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Healthcare CIOs evaluating cloud providers as partners have to make sure that their security expertise is airtight, Bowen said. “Just because a cloud provider has a great set of building blocks doesn’t mean they have great solutions,” he said. “Your building blocks will fall if they are not in the right place.” The session will take place on Wednesday, March 2 at 10:00 a.m. in the Sands Convention Center, Palazzo E Ballroom. Twitter: @HealthITNews

As executive director of the Staten Island Performing Provider System, Joseph Conte is overseeing part of one of the more ambitious and creative healthcare initiatives in New York: the new Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program.

OhioHealth hospitals are among the first users of Epic's MyChart Bedside to enable patients to view their health information, lab results, review videos, exchange messages with their medical team, and generally and plan for the day.

NorthShore University Health System is easing and, in certain instances, automating clinical workflows within electronic records to pinpoint high-risk patients and gaps in care using predictive modeling.