From August 20 – 22nd the annual Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) conference will convene in Atlanta, GA. The meeting brings together leaders, technologist and vendors from state and regional Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) to share, learn and collaborate.
As I looked through the agenda for next week’s meetings, some particularly pressing subjects for HIEs bubbled to the top. Sustainability, which requires business models and service lines that are valuable to their membership, continues to be the top billing. Fortunately, there are a number of sessions that will focus on how patients and healthcare organizations benefit from a unified longitudinal health record.
Other topics include quality measurement, addressing the opioid crisis, consumer and patient engagement, blockchain and the use of social determinants of heath – all familiar, but emerging, industry topics. State and regional exchanges provide benefit in that they can invest in a technology that perhaps small and medium sized practices in their network can’t afford, and then sell the solutions as a service. I look forward to hearing how solutions are being developed and deployed in different communities.
I will have the opportunity to moderate a panel featuring some of the leading HIE CEOs during the conference. As InterSystems customers, each one is unique - having its own governance, populations and geographies, value propositions to stakeholders, and use cases. However, at the core of each value is the aggregated set of data that centers on a patient. This panel will provide an opportunity for them to share their thoughts on the overall trends they are observing about health information exchange and interoperability.
What’s even more exciting is that this panel of experts covers a wide US geography. Panel participants include:
Laura Adams, CEO, Rhode Island Quality Institute
Angie Bass, CEO, Missouri Health Connection
Nick Bonvino, CEO, Greater Houston Healthconnect
Tom Check, CEO, Healthix
Claudia Williams, CEO, Manifest MedEx
Not to give it all away, but we’ll be discussing the recent Promoting Interoperability final rule whereby the Meaningful Use program has been updated and revised by CMS and replaced with a less burdensome version, and the role FHIR can play in an HIE ecosystem. Each HIE’s executive will open the panel with a discussion of what about their organization is unique and the value the organization delivers to its community. They all share a common platform, InterSystems HealthShare, but what makes this panel particularly exciting is that each HIE has found unique solutions that matter to its community. I look forward to sharing more after the conference, including a recording of the session.
HIEs have the capacity and potential to do so many things: impact the opiate crisis in a positive way, promote sustainability in healthcare, and identify conditions in patients that might be overlooked by a single provider. This year’s SHIEC conference has a particular sense of urgency to it as we pivot toward turning value-based care from a dream into a reality, and I am truly looking forward to the conversations we’ll have about moving healthcare forward.
