Interoperability

The University of Virginia Health System wanted to create interactive multimedia reports, believing that radiologists could communicate better through the use of enriched and interactive content.

More than 90 percent of non-federal acute care hospitals are using 2015 edition certified technology or plan to be soon, says National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD.

With help from its integration platform, MedLabs reduced the time it takes to perform an integration to weeks from months, eliminated $33,000 in Medicare reimbursement write-offs and reduced its annual operating expenses.

The accountable care organization connected 14 disparate EHR systems to get meaningful analytics, helping with population health and value-based reimbursement.

The cooperative aims to bring stakeholders together to find new and pragmatic approaches to data sharing, and come up with ways to combat information blocking.

With a proverbial flip of the switch at three locations in Florida and Arizona, Mayo Clinic has completed its $1.5 billion Epic electronic health record implementation, linking all Mayo sites on an integrated EHR and revenue cycle management system. WHY IT MATTERS The Mayo Clinic rollout, called the Plummer Project, in honor of Henry Plummer, MD, who developed a patient-centered health record at Mayo in 1907, is one of the largest, most complex and most expensive Epic implementations ever. First announced in early 2015, the initiative, which sought to replace the health system's existing Cerner and GE systems, had been under consideration for years, said Mayo Clinic CIO Cris Ross. "We really believe that an integrated EHR, across all of our organizations, can help us with that core mission of meeting patients' needs," he told Healthcare IT News at the time. Ross predicted then that rollout would take "about four years to complete." Given that the first two-dozen sites went live in Juy 2017, it's coming in ahead of schedule. There were several milestones along the way, notably go-lives at Mayo Clinic Health System in in November 2017 and Mayo Clinic in Rochester this past May. All told, the project depended on the expertise of nearly 500 IT staff. Now, some 52,000 Mayo employees are using Epic across 90 hospitals and clinics in the Minnesota, Florida and Arizona. "The project is highly complex due to the number of specialties and subspecialties involved," said Ross in another interview earlier this year. "We are not only focused on building and delivering a converged technical solution. We are also invested in the people side of change to support them in adopting, utilizing, and becoming proficient in the Epic system. This is being accomplished through a comprehensive change management strategy." WHAT IS THE TREND Mayo Clinic says the complexity and expense of the project were worthwhile investment for a single unified system that connects patients and providers across the health system, enabling easier access to clinical and billing information regardless of location. More and more, large U.S. health systems such as Mayo are gravitating toward either Epic and Cerner, and the same trend is now also playing out overseas. Other major Epic deals this year include Chicago-based Advocate Health Care and Trinity Health in Michigan. ON THE RECORD "Having one integrated system builds on our core mission of putting the needs of patients first,” says Steve Peters, MD, co-chair of the Plummer Project, in a statement. "This will enable us to enhance services, accelerate innovation and provide better care." "The commitment and expertise of outstanding Mayo staff, Epic colleagues and implementation partners brought us to this day," added co-chair Richard Gray, MD. "We envision even greater collaboration among experts in delivering the patient care, research and education that are hallmarks of Mayo." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

This case study shows how care coordination software is helping Children's National Health System disseminate key discharge documents to the right subacute providers.

Former ONC Privacy Chief and Omada Health Chief Privacy and Regulatory Officer Lucia Savage shares both her concerns and her hope for the industry when it comes to the dreaded data sharing.

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