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Standing in the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS10 is frankly amazing. We are participating in the Emergency Department interoperability scenarios, passing clinical documentation to and from other systems, using IHE standards for information exchange. I was standing with a friend and CMIO who is a practicing physician, and when he saw how easy it was to get information regardless of source, his comment was, ”This is how it is supposed to work, how it was always supposed to work.” I agree. And more vendors than ever are participating.
Talking with the HIMSS folks that orchestrated the impressive setup, I come to find that the numbers of folks “interoperating” in this display have more than doubled in the past two years, now demoing nearly 60 use cases and 28 clinical scenarios. Similar to the IHE show in January, the interest in interoperability and move to embrace standards at HIMSS is palpable. And it’s not just on the show floor – I have been talking to vendors all over that are now delivering or planning to deliver shortly to their customers this type of technology.
HIMSS is always a great conference, but I have to admit – on my flight down to Atlanta, I was slightly dreading four days of endless hypotheses around meaningful use. The understandable theme of this year’s show, meaningful use, has quickly escalated from an exciting and game-changing initiative to one that has even the most optimistic healthcare enthusiasts scratching their heads and drowning in buzzwords, overpromising and under-delivering. It was only at last year’s HIMSS that one of the largest HIT vendors claimed they had meaningful use nailed down (only weeks after the announcement of the initiative) but when tested, couldn’t give a straight answer on what it meant or how it would deliver value to patients.
This year, however, I’m already noticing a reality running through HIMSS that I was pleased to find. This year’s sessions have revealed that a lot of attendees are more comfortable admitting the reality of the situation; that they are just now really understanding the challenges that this will bring. I overheard an IT executive from one of the most prestigious and well-regarded health centers in the world claim, “If we’re not sure that we are going to be ready by 2011, I can only imagine what others are facing.”
The transition of patient care and documentation from one provider to another has always been a challenge for the healthcare industry — disconnected hospital systems can lead to a game of “telephone” with important patient data (on paper or verbally,) which is both inefficient and risky. I have been involved for years in connecting systems together, and the complex interfaces that have been used to do this in the past have been a headache — plus, they have not achieved the seamless “plug and play” that we have seen from other industries. Nobody worries about what brand of mouse or keyboard they purchase anymore, they plug it in and it works. When will we see this kind of Valhalla for medical systems?
Soon, hopefully. Government organizations are now getting involved in setting standards for healthcare systems to work together. I have never seen so much progress and I couldn’t be more excited about it. A lot of this effort is around something called a CCD, or continuity of care document. There are different forms and different names, but they all boil down to a document that summarizes an episode of care, with structured data around things like medications, allergies and a problems list, which can be consumed and used in any system that touches the patient. There is a central “library” that these documents are submitted to, and then can be “checked out” at any time so that the most accurate information is always available to the physician.
