hie

A chat with Tom Moore of Healthix Inc., the largest HIE in the US, housing data for over 20 million unique lives. From detecting patients who may be homeless or at risk for readmission to providing key alerts directly to providers and assisting with closing quality of care gaps, Healthix is true to its mission of mobilizing health information across their communities to advance patient care.

Its current initiatives embody the Small Data principle of "lower volume and higher value." - Tom Moore.

Tom Moore
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-moore-366368/
Tom has worked in information technology for over 20 years including software development, business process re-engineering and management in government, financial services, telecommunications, professional publishing, life sciences and health care. He is currently the Senior Vice President of Innovation for Healthix, a leading health information exchange (HIE) providing services in metro New York City to millions of patients and thousands of providers from hospitals, physician practices, home health agencies, nursing homes and managed care organizations. In addition to leading several major interoperability initiatives, Tom works closely with Healthix members to define and design information services to support improvements in care coordination across disparate organizations.

#HIE #SmallData #BigData #ClinicalAlerts #HIV #Homeless #qualityimprovement

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https://eima-inc.com/lets-talk-small-data

@letstalksmalldatapod

Music credit: Yung Kartz

As of 2015 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT had awarded $548 million in grants to states to establish health information exchanges (HIE). I have no doubt hundreds of millions of dollars more have been invested in various ways since then. So, when faced with one of the most daunting healthcare data challenges of our time in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, surely, we turned to the HIEs first. Right? Not so much, according to today’s guest.

Niam Yaraghi, assistant professor of Business Technology at Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, recently explored the use of HIEs in vaccination efforts across the country. He tells us that “While the U.S. employed every possible resource to develop the vaccines, we are neglecting to use the best available information technologies to efficiently distribute them”.

In Yaraghi’s recent article, co-authored with Brookings Institution colleague Peter Levin, they share that none of the state vaccination plans they reviewed made any mention of using HIEs to support the effort. Further, they found no correlation between a state’s vaccination success and the existence of a robust HIE infrastructure in that state.  

There are some efforts underway to change this, including ONC’s $20 million investment to help increase data sharing between health information exchanges (HIEs) and immunization information systems. Still, the question remains: why aren’t we using HIEs to their fullest potential to support the vaccine rollout? And why aren’t we turning to the HIEs first whenever we need to move clinical data in general? On this episode, we explore those questions plus:

• Five ways that health information exchange can help with vaccination efforts.
• How HIEs can change the conversation when it comes to revenue generation.
• The opportunity for HIEs to add value and transform data into information through analytics.
• How might HIEs play a role in reopening the economy?
• Will HIEs play a role in patient-mediated exchange?
• Why it’s time for the industry to rethink its views on HIE and make them their first stop for interop.
• Plus, some novel API ideas for HIEs.

Niam Yaraghi

Niam Yaraghi is an Assistant Professor of Business Technology at Miami Herbert Business School, and a non-resident Fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation.

Niam's research is focused on the economics of health information technologies. In particular, Niam studies the business models and policy structures that incentivize interoperability and sharing of health information among patients, providers, payers and regulators. Niam's research has appeared in leading business journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Production and Operations Management, as well as top-tier health policy and informatics journals including Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, and Milbank Quarterly.

He regularly consults with various companies and platforms in the healthcare industry and is a sought-after expert and speaker on issues related to health information technology in media and at industry conferences.

Niam has a B.Sc in Industrial Engineering from the Isfahan University of Technology in Iran, and a M.Sc from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He received his Ph.D. in Management Science & Systems from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Twitter: @niamyaraghi

HIE Links and Resources

• The benefits of health information exchange platforms: Measuring the returns on a half a billion dollar investment
• Five ways that health information exchange can help with vaccination efforts
• Episode 140: Getting to Know eHealth Exchange – The Largest Health Information Network in the Country – Jay Nakashima
• Episode 129: What you need to Know About TEFCA Right Now w/ Mariann Yeager
• Episode 104: Why HIEs Will Lead the Way on Healthcare Quality Measurement w/ John D’Amore
• The Regional HIE Should be Your First Stop for Interop
• Plus 4 more #HCBiz Discussions with Niam Yaraghi

The #HCBiz Show! is produced by Glide Health IT, LLC in partnership with Netspective Media.

A year after Draft 2 of TEFCA, what has happened and where are we now? The ONC awarded a cooperative agreement to The Sequoia Project to serve as the Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE) to develop, update, implement, and maintain the Common Agreement and the QTF. On today's episode, Shahid Shah joins your host, Don Lee to talk with the CEO of The Sequoia Project, Mariann Yeager. If you are an HIE and you want to become a QHIN (or sell to one), this episode is for you.

Highlights from What you need to Know About TEFCA Right Now

TEFCA, Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, are the rules of the road and the specific technical requirements to enable health information networks to interconnect.

• Sequoia has an HIE portfolio and is helping the ONC to implement TEFCA
• What is a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN)?
• Minimum requirements for legal and privacy vs. technical implementation details for interoperability
• What do product managers, developers, and customers need to know about TEFCA? Read the QTF!
• The technology used for treatment based exchange is the easy part. TEFCA provides the trusted community to get over the privacy concerns.
• Ms. Yeager breaks down the TEFCA Value Proposition.
• What parts of TEFCA are descriptive vs. prescriptive?
• Does the government or industry get to decide what it means to be "TEFCA compliant"?

Mariann Yeager

Mariann Yeager, CEO has more than 20 years of experience in the health information technology field. She currently serves as CEO for The Sequoia Project, a non-profit solely focused on advancing secure, interoperable nationwide health data sharing in the US.  She also leads the Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE) effort, in close collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to develop, implement, and maintain the Common Agreement component of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) and to operationalize the Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) designation and monitoring process. The Sequoia Project also serves as a steward of independently governed health IT interoperability initiatives including the Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE) and the RSNA Image Share Validation Program.  Under her leadership, The Sequoia Project supported, the startup, growth and maturation of two highly successfully interoperability initiatives, the eHealth Exchange and Carequality, which now operate as independent non-profit organizations.  Prior to her tenure at The Sequoia Project, she worked with the HHS Office of National Coordinator (ONC) for five years on nationwide health information network initiatives.  She also led the launch and operation of the first ambulatory and inpatient EHR certification program in the US. 

The Sequoia Project

The Sequoia Project is a non-profit, 501c3, public-private collaborative chartered to advance implementation of secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange. The Sequoia Project focuses on solving real-world interoperability challenges and brings together public and private stakeholders in forums like the Interoperability Matters cooperative to overcome barriers. Sequoia also supports multiple, independently governed interoperability initiatives, such as the Patient Unified Lookup Service for Emergencies (PULSE), a system used by disaster healthcare volunteers to treat individuals injured or displaced by disasters.

Links and Resources

• www.sequoiaproject.org
• Interoperability Matters
• Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE)
• Qualified Health Information Network (Q-HIN) Technical Framework or QTF page 70, Appendix 3
• Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE)
• TEFCA Public Webinars

@sequoiaproject on Twitter

I've been saying it for years. The regional Health Information Exchange (HIE) should be your first stop for interop. That's especially true when it comes to quality measurement. Patients are going to get care in many settings and their data is going to be stored in many EHRs. According to today's guest, a sick Medicare patient may see 6-7 doctors in a given year! Proper quality measurement will require every hospital and every practice to proactively connect with one another AND solve the underlying data quality problems.  FACT: It'll never happen. 

I know what you're thinking. That's why we need to have interoperability in healthcare, right!? Well, as Thomas Edison said, "opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Healthcare interoperability has already been solved, but it requires a lot of hard work and we don't like that. 

The good news is that there are strong HIEs operating across the country and they're in the business of doing that hard work for you. On today's episode, we talk with John D'Amore, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Diameter Health, about the role of HIEs in healthcare quality measurement. We discuss:

• Why HIEs are the right place to start when it comes to quality measurement
• Why it's important to think about quality measurement and clinical-decision support as 2-sides of the same coin
• Why we'll never have ubiquitous interop between all providers and all EHRs
• Why the ATM is a terrible analogy for healthcare interop
• Why data quality is such an important and misunderstood part of our interop and quality measure issues
• How the ONC and CMS NPRMs create opportunities and barriers for HIEs and quality measurement
• How health plans are utilizing HIE data to support HEDIS-measurement and other workflows.
• WHat NCQA is doing to support data aggregators and exchanges to enable the exchange of clinical data for measurement
• Why you might want to check out the NCQA & HL7 Digital Quality Summit in Boston July 16-18.

Check out Episode 23: Quality Measures: Past, Present and Future w/ John D'Amore for a more general discussion on healthcare quality measurement history and trends.

For full show notes and links, visit: https://TheHCBiz.com

This episode explores how data and analytics could revolutionize the life sciences and health care industry and transform the future of care.

This interview is part of our HIMSS18 coverage. We'll be talking with thought leaders and vendors all week at the annual Health Information Management Society conference in Las Vegas.

On this episode we chat with Brian Mack, Manager, Marketing and Communications at Great Lakes Health Connect and HIMSS 18 Social Media Ambassador.  

You can find all of our HIMSS '18 Interviews here.

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If you like what we're doing here, then please consider signing up for our weekly newsletter.

The #HCBiz Show! is produced by Glide Health IT, LLC in partnership with Netspective Media.

Music by StudioEtar

This interview is part of our HIMSS18 coverage. We'll be talking with thought leaders and vendors all week at the annual Health Information Management Society conference in Las Vegas.

On this episode, we're talking with Kelly Thompson, CEO of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) and Dan Chavez, Executive Director at San Diego Health Connect.

About the Strategic Health Information Collaborative (SHIEC)

SHIEC is a national collaborative representing health information exchanges (HIEs). The organization already represents 60 HIEs, and these HIEs collectively cover more than 200 million people across the U.S., well over half of the American population.

http://strategichie.com/

@SHIEClive

About Kelly Thompson

As SHIEC CEO, Kelly Hoover Thompson is responsible for working collaboratively with SHIEC’s members and board of directors to develop and actively advance an organizational strategy that ensures SHIEC’s success. Her goal is to elevate the awareness, stature, and perception of HIEs on the national healthcare landscape.

Before joining SHIEC, Thompson was Deputy Secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Health. While there, she created a new long-term care partnership in care delivery and oversight. Under her leadership, the eHealth Partnership achieved statewide connectivity, offering electronic health information exchange in every county of the Commonwealth. She also co-founded and led the Commonwealth’s Privacy and Security Practice Group.

Prior to this, Thompson was a senior advocate of policy and regulatory matters for the Hospital & Health System Association of Pennsylvania. In that role, she advised providers on health policy, regulatory and legislative matters. She established the Annual Organ & Tissue Donation Hospital Campaign and was a primary drafter of the Commonwealth’s deemed status legislation, aimed at ensuring timely standards for health care facility oversight.

Thompson serves on the board of the YWCA of Greater Harrisburg. She holds an appointment to the Lower Swatara Township Civil Service Commission.

About San Diego Health Connect

San Diego Health Connect securely connects hospitals, health systems, patients, private health information exchanges (HIEs) and other healthcare stakeholders—so that they can share important health information. As a not-for-profit organization, our sole purpose is to serve every member of the community and improve healthcare for everyone.

About Dan Chavez

Daniel J. Chavez joined San Diego Beacon HIE as Executive Director in March 2013 with more than 30 years of health care information technology experience. He has an extensive track record of cultivating startups, business development and product marketing. Previously, he served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Independa, a San Diego-based innovator that provides solutions to help the elderly remain independent. In his previous positions, Chavez was Executive Vice President at Payformance Corporation, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the medical division of Immersion Corporation, and Senior Vice President at Availity. His prior experience includes IBM, GTE, SAIC, Stellcom Technologies and CSC. He holds a BA from San Jose State University and an MBA from Stanford University.

And checkout the rest of our HIMSS18 Interviews here.

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If you like what we're doing here, then please consider signing up for our weekly newsletter.

The #HCBiz Show! is produced by Glide Health IT, LLC in partnership with Netspective Media.

Music by StudioEtar

It’s rare you read an article about health tech and not see the word "interoperability" at some point, probably more than once. If that were a drinking game, we’d all be really drunk by now. Today I speak with Don Lee, a fellow podcast host about how Health Information Exchanges, otherwise known as HIEs, can assist us in the short term to get our data integration act together. This is a little bit of a reality check— blockchain and more elegant solutions might be coming, but today, right now, we need to meet quality measures. And you can’t meet quality measures without having a handle on the trips to the ER, eye exams, and specialist visits that are transpiring outside the four walls of any given provider office. 

Don is an accomplished Health IT expert with a 20-year track record of driving value with technology.

Don began his career as custom software developer and eventually built and lead a team of more than 30 engineers.  Later, he was the subject matter expert, product manager and head of sales and marketing for a digital health startup that launched a SaaS-platform focused on administrative simplification in healthcare.

Today, Don is President of Glide Health IT, LLC, a consulting firm that helps forward-looking organizations align their Health IT and business strategies. The firm specializes in business and product development with a focus on data aggregation, interop, analytics and quality measurement.

Don is also the founder, co-host and Executive Producer of The #HCBiz Show!, a podcast dedicated to unraveling the Business of Healthcare.

00:00 Don talks the meaning of Interoperability.
01:30 The problem with interoperability.
02:00 The data sharing risk.
02:25 The change in the interoperability conversation because of Quality Measures.
04:15 The elusive concept of interoperability.
05:50 The best path forward - HIEs.
08:25 “One of the biggest hurdles of Healthcare Interoperability is there is so many people working on Healthcare Interoperability.”
09:15 “We got to be smarter about what we choose to compete on.”
10:10 The issues with the expectations of the digitization of healthcare.
12:50 Currently successful and well-covered HIE groups.
14:00 HIPAA & formatting health data.
18:15 The problem with provider data and the need for a good directory.
20:00 Why it’s important that Health Systems know who is in each of their Health Plans.
24:25 What’s being done to try and fix provider lists for Health Plans.
28:00 You can learn more by going to glidehealthit.com or don.lee@glidehealthit.com or by going to thehcbiz.com to listen to Don’s podcast.

On this episode, we talk with John D'Amore. John is Founder, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Diameter Health and has been working on Quality Measures in healthcare since the early 2000s. Yup, pre-EMR quality measures!

John takes us on a fascinating journey from paper based quality measurement (see RHQDAPU... at least we've streamlined our acronyms!) to the dawn of electronic measurement. via the Electronic Medical Record (EMR).  He explains why the single-EMR approach made sense in the hospital, but how the industry was hurt when it decided to apply that approach in the ambulatory setting.  Finally, John describes the future state where quality measures are calculated from a longitudinal patient record that encompasses all the care a patient has received. This, of course, calls for a trusted central authority to do the aggregation, data remediation and reporting. Perhaps, an HIE?

It's a complex story and John delivers it well. We dig through all that and so much more, including:

• What are Quality Measures and why do we need them? (1:23)
• John D'Amore's background and the founding of Diameter Health (5:30)
• What has been the historic approach to quality measurement in healthcare? (8:00)
• Should we limit quality measures in the short-term to only those that can be understood by patients? (13:00)
• How do we pick the measures? What do we care about? (17:30)
• What might a quality program look-like in a "digital-native" world? (21:10)
• How can we move from a retrospective, tell me what happened world, to one where clinicians and administrators get the data when there's still time to impact outcomes? (25:48)
• We talk about the difference between clinical and claims data, and explore why the clinical data is not flowing. (30:30)
• John gives an example of an HIE that's achieved great success in Quality Reporting (Indian Health Information Exchange) and we explore why they've been successful (33:00)
• Will providers start to realize that a robust HIE can help them improve quality scores and potentially increase revenue? (36:15)
• Why is Data Quality such a linchpin issue when it comes to quality measures? (38:15)
• How does data fidelity, or fitness for purpose, differ when looking at a single chart vs. longitudinal data sources form many systems? (42:50)
• John and Shahid are both speaking at the Digital Quality Summit. We discuss their talks and goals for the event. (45:45)

We'll be continuing the Quality Measurement series over the next month or two. I hope you enjoy the setup episode as much as I did!

~ Don Lee

Eric Rosow serves as CEO of Diameter Health.  He has more than 25 years of experience in healthcare technology, new venture creation and executive management. Prior to co-founding Diameter Health, Eric served as the VP and General Manager of the Patient Flow business unit for Eclipsys and Allscripts. Preceding that, Eric was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Premise, a company he co-founded and led through its sale to Eclipsys. Before founding Premise, Eric was the Director of Biomedical Engineering at Hartford Hospital.

Eric is passionate about building high performance entrepreneurial teams that challenge the status quo and create disruptive, yet pragmatic healthcare IT innovations.

A native of Avon, CT, Eric earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering at Trinity College, and a MS in Biomedical Engineering from the Hartford Graduate Center/Rensselaer in Hartford. He holds several patents and has authored more than 50 academic papers, several book chapters and a textbook on virtual bioinstrumentation.

At the community level, as a former member of the U.S. National Rowing Team and an active Masters rower, Eric volunteers as a varsity crew coach for the Avon High School Rowing Program, which he helped co-found in 2007. He is also an active participant in the Pan Mass Challenge, an annual bike-a-thon that raises money for life-saving cancer research and treatment.

Contact info:

email:  erosow@diameterhealth.com

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-rosow-5aa843/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/erosow

00:00 Eric’s intention when he began his start-up.
03:25 The big Data Analytics players in the industry right now.
07:00 “Can you identify that across all these different environments?”
07:30 Leveraging and improving Interoperability and turning it into Semantic Interoperability.
09:20 The ability to unify, to duplicate, to enrich, and provide a common single data set with Clinical Concepts.
11:50 Incorrect Data vs. Incorrect Syntax or Vocabulary.
12:30 A fatal Semantic Interoperability error.
14:00 Eric discusses EMPI functionality from Diameter Health’s Normalization Engine called ‘Fusion.
17:30 Adding Claims Data.
18:15 Turning Clinical Data into something a Physician can trust.
19:45 Diameter Health’s Super CCD.
20:00 Diameter Health’s partnership with the Physician-led HIE, Kansas Health Information Network.
23:00 “We really endeavor to provide a single screen, that provides a single, normalized view of each of the sections from that normalized set of CCDs for that patient, for that encounter.”
27:45 You can find out more information at diameterhealth.com.
28:00 Why ‘Diameter’.

Cindy Munn has 25+ years of experience in health care leadership and operations management. As CEO of the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum, Munn oversees development of the organization’s strategic roadmap supporting an integrated approach to transforming health care. She has oversight responsibility for initiatives including health information technology, practice transformation assistance and analytics support for community/state-based QI projects. She serves on boards of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement and TexLa Telehealth Resource Center. Munn holds a BS degree in Medical Technology from LSU and an MS degree in Health Administration from the University of St. Francis in Illinois.

cmunn@lhcqf.org
@CindyMunnCEO

00:00 Cindy explains what an HIE does.
02:30 LaHIE
03:00 Capturing ED visits, whether Emergency Rooms are interfaced or not.
03:50 41% of ED visits are non-emergent.
06:30 The troublesome pattern of emergency department visits.
08:00 Connecting Emergency Departments so that every ED is able to access patient information.
09:00 The clinical portal that allows EDs to identify drug-seeking patterns.
09:30 What drove Louisiana to create a portal to combat prescription drug abuse.
10:50 LaHIE’s partnership with employers.
12:45 The value of partnerships with employers and increasing the number of participating hospitals and organizations.
16:45 The benefit of an HIE in educating employers about employee/patient patterns.
19:00 Working with communities to address specific patient behaviors to improve outcomes.
20:10 Supporting and integrating drug registries.
22:00 Working to give pharmacists faster access to HIE’s.
24:40 “Everyone is critical in relation to improving Population Health.”
26:20 The providers that get the most out of HIE’s like LaHIE.
29:20 You can find out more at www.lhcqf.org.

Teresa Rivera joined the Utah Health Information Network in 2007. As President & CEO, she is accountable to ensure that UHIN achieves its mission of providing services that reduce healthcare costs and improve quality and access for the community through exchange and use of administrative and clinical information. UHIN’s broad membership includes all the hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, national laboratories and approximately 90% of the medical providers in Utah.

Teresa’s past experience includes responsibility for operations as the Vice President of Benefit Administration at BlueCross BlueShield of Utah and client relations as the Vice President of Client Relations at HealthCare Insight, a fraud and overpayment discovery service. She has had the opportunity to work with production, service, technical and membership areas in those companies. Her focus is service, employee development and community involvement which she believes is essential to business success.

Teresa holds a MBA with an emphasis in Human and Organizational Development and a Bachelor of Science, Summa Cum Laude, in Management with a minor in Computer Science from Westminster College

Teresa is married with two adult children. Her community activities have included working with the Utah Partnership for Education; Salt Lake Community College Customer Service Program and Executive Program Advisory Councils; Utah/Intermountain Chapter of the International Customer Service Association; and the Salt Lake Master Gardener Association and currently is a member of HIMSS and holds a Board position at Mountain West Chapter of AAHAM, Utah Chapter of HIMSS, Strategic HIE Collaborative, HIE User Group and National Association of Trusted Exchange, NATE.

00:00 Teresa talks about the start of the Utah Health Information Network (UHIN), one of the oldest HIEs in the country.
01:50 UHIN’s origin as a Clearing House, and what a Clearing House does in the healthcare industry.
03:00 UHIN’s vision for the future as it grew as an organization supporting quality effort.
04:30 UHIN’s decision to move towards the clinical focus, and the challenges it presented.
06:20 “One of the most difficult aspects of starting a Health Information Exchange is the governance.”
07:40 UHIN’s strategy to work with entities with the largest amount of data first, in order to build an advantage and grow as an HIE.
08:30 One of UHIN’s most successful tactics when growing and connecting with providers.
10:00 How UHIN’s connection with providers are benefiting patients and building new endeavors to improve patient health overall.
18:30 The next step in linking pharmacies to UHIN’s HIE initiatives.
21:00 The next piece in connecting pharmacies to HIEs in order to follow up that patients are receiving their medications.
24:30 Connecting Long Term Care to HIEs.
27:00 Long Term Care’s disqualifications for EHR and HIE reimbursement grants, and UHIN’s work to assist LTC providers with joining HIEs despite this.
29:40 The Poison Control Center and the benefits of its connection to HIEs as well.
32:00 HISPs and what they do.
34:00 Making HIEs interoperable.
37:50 You can learn more at www.UHIN.org.

Anuj Desai is the Vice President of Market Development for the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC). In this role, he has overall responsibility for business development, fundraising, marketing, and events. Anuj oversees the development and management of strategic relationships and alliances with the various vendors and partners that interact with NYeC. He also leads the New York Digital Health Accelerator, the NYeC Gala, and activities related to national policy development and interoperability.

Anuj brings over 15 years of experience in business development, strategy, and relationship management experience in the health care industry. Most recently, he worked in a business development role at Johnson & Johnson focused on developing whitespace strategy and forming business cases for M&A and organic growth in health technology. Previously, he has worked for a software consulting company developing clinical data management tools for pharma and biotech clientele. He received his MBA from University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and his undergraduate degree in Biotechnology from Rutgers University. He has been recognized by multiple organizations including Crain’s New York Business 2013 Class of “40 Under 40” and Modern Healthcare’s "Up and Comer’s Award.

00:00 Anuj explains what the NYeHealth Collaborative is.
01:20 Why New York is so well invested in the eHealth cause.
03:30 The most successful players in healthcare will be those who are the most collaborative.
05:30 How payment reform is driving collaboration.
06:00 The definition of interoperability in context of healthcare within NYeHealth’s perspective.
07:40 The high cost of building an interface that could share data between each very different EHR systems.
08:30 How the NYeHealth Collaborative worked toward developing a certification program that EHR and HIE systems can pass to be deemed fully interoperable.
10:20 Why standardizing interfaces is financially wise.
12:50 How Medicaid fits into the SHINY.
15:30 Anuj explains the Accelerator program, and how it came about.
17:45 The selection process for the Accelerator program.
19:30 How a provider selects companies that they want to work with, so there’s no time wasted on unnecessary or unwanted needs.
21:00 The mutually beneficial relationship that the Accelerator program provides between providers and companies.
22:30 How the Accelerator program measures outcomes and evaluates success.
26:20 Why companies may find success or failure because of differing needs for pharma companies and providers.
27:45 Why the Accelerator program is more for already-established companies looking to grow, and not so much seed companies.
29:40 What Anuj thinks the next evolution in Healthcare is going to look like.
32:00 How providers are navigating patient engagement and the dozens of companies emerging to build solutions for patient engagement.

Laura Adams is the President and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), a center of collaborative innovation that advances health and healthcare transformation. RIQI is the only organization in the nation to win all three of the major HITECH health IT grants which funded CurrentCare (the statewide health information exchange), the RI Regional Extension Center and the RI Beacon Community, bringing in $27M in funding. She was recently appointed to the Governor’s Workgroup on Healthcare Innovation.

Laura served on the ONC’s HIT Policy Committee’s Governance Panel for the Nationwide Health Information Network. She is a member of the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) Center for Patient and Family Centered Care Advisory Group and chaired the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Planning Committee for the “Digital Infrastructure for Population Health and a Learning Healthcare System” workshop series.

Laura led the governance consulting for the Improving Performance in Practice (IPIP) Initiative, a RWJF-funded collaboration among the American Board of Medical Specialties, and the Boards and Societies of Internal Medicine, Family Physicians and Pediatrics. She traveled in the U.S. and Europe with W. Edwards Deming in the study of statistical-based quality improvement. She was Founder, President and CEO of Decision Support Systems, a New York-based company specializing in Internet-based healthcare decision support.

Laura has been a faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston since its inception. She directed the IHI Idealized Design of the Intensive Care Unit project and served as faculty in the VHA’s ICU improvement collaborative. She was among the first to bring the principles of healthcare QI to the Middle East, in conjunction with Donald Berwick, MD and the Harvard Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East. She served as IHI faculty at the inaugural IHI Middle East Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare in Doha, Qatar in 2013.

Her publications include co-authoring with Gustafson, et al, Developing & Testing a Model to Predict Outcomes of Organizational Change, Health Services Research, 38(2), 751-776 and co-authoring “Collaborating with Consumers to Advance Health Knowledge and Improve Practice” Herzlinger, R, Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers and Policymakers, 2004. She also co-authored “A Draft Framework for Measuring Progress Towards the Development of a National Health Information Infrastructure, BMC Medical Informatics Decision Making, June, 2005.   Laura co-authored “Improving comfort and communication in the ICU: a practical new tool for palliative care performance measurement and feedback”, Nelson, J., Mulkerin, C., Adams, L. and Pronovost, P.; Quality and Safety in Health Care (QSHC), Aug 2006. She co-authored with Peter Pronovost, MD, et.al. in The Rhode Island ICU Collaborative: A Model for Reducing CLABSI and Ventilator-associated Pneumonia Statewide, QSHC, 2010;19:555-561.   She also co-authored publication with M. Vigorito and B. Sexton entitled Collaborative Improvement in Sepsis Identification & Treatment, JQPS, Vol. 37, No. 11, Nov. 2011.

RIQI won the 2013 National Council for Community Behavioral Health Excellence Award for Impact in serving those with behavioral health and substance abuse challenges. Laura has received citations from the RI Congressional delegation for her visionary leadership and contributions to improving the healthcare system in Rhode Island. She received University of Northern Colorado’s Distinguished Alumni award and in 2014, RIQI was named RI’s Most Innovative Company in Healthcare by the Providence Business News.

00:00 Laura explains the mission of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI).
00:30 Laura explains what the general concept of a Health Information Exchange is--one of the services provided by the RIQI.
03:00 The issues with the uptake of Health Information Exchanges.
04:30 “What business are we in? We want to share that information because patient’s lives depend on it.”
06:15 The tragedy of the commons in relation to Health Information Exchanges.
08:50 Why transparency is important to the RIQI.
09:10 “The only power we have is the power of vision.”
10:20 The balance between the financial incentive to hoard data and the moral incentive to save lives by sharing data.
11:40 The payment for value system, and how this is encouraging providers to share their data instead of hoarding it.
13:30 The improvements that Laura has observed from active Health Information Exchange.
15:00 Laura explains the dashboard system that RIQI has developed, and the alerts that this system provides for Nurse Care Managers.
17:00 How RIQI is expanded this alert system to extend to patients and their families.
23:50 How patients would be able to upload their own information into the Health Information Exchange.
26:45 Advanced Directives and other information gaps that only patients are able to provide.
29:00 How RIQI’s Health Information Exchange system sifts efficiently through an immense amount of data.
33:30 How RIQI is connecting their Health Information Exchange system with their major providers one at a time.
37:45 You can find out more at www.RIQI.org or by emailing Laura directly at LAdams@RIQI.org.