News Feature | October 26, 2015

Vendors Come To Interoperability Metric Consensus

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Vendors Come To Interoperability Metric Consensus

As healthcare moves into an era of EHR (electronic health records) standardization, the industry is left to figure out the best way to measure the concept of interoperability.

In September, according to Health IT Interoperability, HL7 wrote a letter to Congress requesting support for improving the interoperability infrastructure in the U.S. A few weeks later, the American Society of Clinical Oncology urged the legislative body to push adoption of interoperability standards as a support of its CancerLinQ platform for patient treatment.

Additionally, the federal Health IT Policy Committee (HITPC) task force on addressing barriers to healthcare interoperability is scheduled to have a report to Congress by end of year that will include calls to action designed to dovetail with ONC’s Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap.

Stakeholder’s Meet To Determine Metrics

Earlier this month, a group of EHR stakeholders met at the KLAS Keystone Summit in Midway, UT, to determine objective measures around healthcare interoperability and reporting. The summit was led and moderated by Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and resulted in the release of the following statement by attending executives:

“On October 2, 2015, a broad group of EHR stakeholders, including vendor CEOs and provider ClOs, agreed by consensus to objective measures of interoperability and ongoing reporting. Leaders of 12 different EHR vendor companies proactively stepped forward to have an independent entity publish transparent measures of health information exchange that can serve as the basis for understanding our current position and trajectory. Assisted by leading provider organizations and informatics experts, these executive officers knocked down barriers to arrive at measures to improve interoperability for the public good. Vendors and providers willingly committed to go arm in arm to work closely with Washington to help alleviate the interoperability-measurement burden faced by the government.”

The following 12 companies sent executives to be involved in building and shaping the measurement:

  • Allscripts (Assaf Halevy, VP of business development, solutions management)
  • athenahealth (Jonathan Bush, CEO)
  • Cerner (Zane Burke, president)
  • eClinicalWorks (Girish Kumar, CEO)
  • Epic (Judy Faulkner, CEO)
  • GE Healthcare (Jan De Witte, president and CEO HCIT)
  • Greenway (Tee Green, CEO)
  • Healthland (Chris Bauleke, CEO)
  • McKesson (Jeff Felton, president)
  • MEDITECH (Hoda Sayed-Friel, EVP)
  • MEDHOST (Steve Starkey, VP of product)
  • NextGen Healthcare (Rusty Frantz, president and CEO)