But the real story driving interoperability is accountable care organizations (ACOs).  “Accountable care” is a concept of organizing and delivering health care which strives for:

• Better care
• Lower cost
• Enhanced patient experience

Tying these together are new provider payment strategies that encourage a higher quality of care at a higher value. An accountable care organization is an existing group of providers, typically a health system, who agree to follow the new accountable care concept of health care delivery and to focus on optimizing the health of a population of patients.

To deliver on this new model of care delivery, providers must be electronically connected so they can collaborate in new, efficient ways never seen before in the United States – and interoperability is at the core of this effort. Because of this, the blank stares we got a few years ago when we evangelized the concept of online collaboration have turned into nodding heads. This shift validates that technologies like ours are not just nice-to-haves, but must-haves.

The result: “Interoperability means the ability of health information systems to work together within and across organizational boundaries in order to advance the effective delivery of healthcare for individuals and communities.”

To flesh out their definition, this same committee also called out several dimensions of interoperability:

• Uniform movement of healthcare data from one system to another
• Uniform presentation of data
• Uniform safeguarding data security and integrity as data moves from system to system
• Uniform protection of patient confidentiality
• Uniform assurance of a common degree of system service quality

(Read the HIMSS paper. [PDF])

With more than 10 years under our belts of enabling health information systems to interoperate, Medicity is at the forefront of making true interoperability a reality. Join us here over the next few weeks as we share our insights on a number of aspects of interoperability.

What does our success at the IHE Connectathon mean? That we are able to walk the walk – not just talk the talk – when it comes to implementing the entire gamut of standards-based health information exchange. It also proves our ability to integrate seamlessly within the workflow of EHR systems.

We passed every profile we tested at the event, focusing particularly on those related to the following HIE services:

• Identity Management Services: PIX v3 (manager), PDQ v3 (manager)
• Record Locator Services: XCA (initiating and responding gateway) and XCPD (cross-community patient discovery)
• Audit and Logging: ATNA (client and server), CT (consistent time)
• Exchanging data within the workflow of an EHR system:  (eXchange Document Service – XDS.b and the associated security profiles)

Health IT vendors that we demonstrated interoperability with during testing included:

• EHRs:
  • Allscripts (Enterprise, Professional, My Way and Sunrise)
  • Cerner (PowerChart, BrowserSoft)
  • NextGen
• HIE vendors:
  • CertifyMD
  • Oracle
  • Harris/CareFx
• And many more …

IHE is a recognized leader, both nationally and internationally, in creating healthcare industry standards related to the exchange of clinical information across organizational boundaries. Key IHE standards were adopted by the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange (NwHIN Exchange) and the Direct Project. And many statewide, regional, and private HIEs leverage IHE standards.

What does a stable partner look like? Many companies have come into healthcare IT simply because the opportunity is rich and there is money to be made. Stability, however, comes from companies that are fully invested in healthcare and in technology solutions designed to assist providers in their efforts to lower costs, improve quality, and navigate the changing healthcare landscape. Medicity has been in the business of creating technology for healthcare providers since 1999 and remains solely focused on serving the healthcare market. Find out more about what a stable partner can do for you.

Medicity technology facilitated the exchange of Direct messages between physicians’ offices in Lima, Ohio, and Biloxi, Mississippi. Mississippi’s state-designated HIE – the Mississippi Health Information Network (MS-HIN) – is also a Medicity client.

“We at ONC are excited to see this first productive use of Direct protocols for the exchange of health information between two states,” said Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The Partnership also performed live instances of Direct messaging within the state of Ohio. Get more details from the Ohio press release that circulated today.

With these successful exchanges of Direct messages accomplished, the Ohio Health Information Partnership and Medicity are finalizing a mass deployment plan to provide all Ohio practices with our Direct application. We look forward to additional breakthroughs and firsts in this new frontier of health information exchange.

Specifically, emerging HIE technology is making collaboration possible at lower levels of care. For example, technology now enables point-to-point referrals from one physician practice to another. This means that a physician practice’s staff can conveniently manage what is happening in the care of the patient on each end of the referral. Just being able to see when a patient is scheduled and whether he or she shows up for the appointment adds a transparency that significantly improves management of the patient’s care. These are simple concepts, but they have enormous impact on the health care provider and systems themselves, Robert says.

HIE technology will evolve in two layers – the top layer being aggregating information, normalizing it, creating an entire view of a population; the lower layer facilitating the care of a particular individual. A social-networking approach to sharing health information will emerge, Robert predicts, with micro HIEs appearing to create a network around a patient that involves only members of that specific patient’s care team, regardless of brick-and-mortar boundaries between these providers.

While the current technology focused on the setting is incredibly valuable when it comes to improving care and performance and reducing malpractice, we need to go further to accommodate what physicians really want, Robert believes. And what physicians want is clinical intelligence delivered to them at the point of care. Currently, the industry in general is only at the level of tying systems together – essentially just laying the pipes. To get physicians to adapt technology broadly, we need to give them more and better information on which to make care decisions.

Robert also notes that the trend toward electronic health records (EHRs), patient-centered medical homes, and accountable care organizations (ACOs) will get not only the physician, but nurses and staff – the people who facilitate the capture and collection of data as well as collaboration – involved in using technology to improve patient care. Nurses and staff are, in fact, the lynchpin to creating and evolving a new information system, he says.

Equally important, he says, is the emergence of platforms, which are basically technology tools that enable software developers to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to create the solutions and that allow users themselves to piece together what they need, in effect putting the user in control. The most prominent example of platform technology is the smart phone. Software developers can create apps to run on the open platform, and users can then select and download the specific apps that enable them to execute what they want to do.

According to Robert, Medicity and others are turning to platform technology to increase throughput, enable expansion to incorporate more solutions, and fulfill customer needs without requiring a long development cycle. The amount of time and effort it takes to build technology now is infinitely less than it was even 10 years ago, he notes. Because of the time it took to develop solutions, people in the past had to adapt to technology. In the new age, technology adapts to the user. This trend is beginning to happen now in health care and will increase rapidly.

Stay tuned next week for our continued look at Robert’s predictions for the future of health information technology.

Over the years, Robert’s vision of the future has led to a number of pioneering innovations including introducing the use of intelligent software agents to meet the challenges of health information exchange between hospitals, physicians, and other stakeholders in the health care community.

At a recent Medicity webinar entitled “Disrupt or Take a Seat: Here’s the Future of Health IT,” Robert focused on key disruptive technologies that are coming down the pike.

Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe patterns in which unexpected innovations suddenly displace current products or services, thus disrupting the existing market.

Examples of this include YouTube and social media displacing traditional media (newspapers, TV); no-frills Southwest Airlines disrupting the airline industry; Netflix disrupting Blockbuster; Amazon displacing independent brick and mortar bookstores.

According to Christensen, “An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.”

Stay tuned for next week’s blog, which will overview Robert’s predictions about disruptive health care technologies.

Physicians tend to listen to and trust other physicians. Hoag Hospital – a health system located in Newport Beach, California – embraced this concept. To educate and encourage its network of community doctors to use the Hoag HIE’s services, Hoag and Medicity created a video featuring local doctors who are using the system. In less than five minutes, the video provides a convincing story about the range of benefits physicians and their office staff realize using electronic health information exchange.

The video is part of several short educational pieces – some less than a minute long – on different topics available on the Hoag HIE’s YouTube channel. Signing up for the HIE is easy through Hoag’s website.

To learn more about Hoag and its HIE progress and plans, register for a free webinar featuring Hoag’s Director of HIE, Kieran Murphy, today – November 2 – at 1 p.m. EST.