Industry Experts Describe Progress on Health Information Interoperability at Capitol Hill Briefing
The Healthcare Leadership Council hosted a briefing September 22 on Capitol Hill, discussing how to issue surrounding interoperability in health information exchange. Experts from four companies, all members of the HLC, shared their insights on what has been successful so far, and where the industry should continue to focus in order to make greater steps towards interoperability.
Melissa Owens, Vice President of Implementation Services and Support at Marshfield Clinic, spoke about the clinic’s commitment to interoperability as early as the 1980’s. She named three factors that have driven the growth of the regional Health Information Exchange (HIE), which are: Full operational backing for integrations that improves patient care, recognizing that the hurdles are not purely technical, and continued commitment to the technology platform.
Surescripts was represented by David Yakimischak, Executive Vice President and General Manager, who discussed the lessons learned through the company’s pioneering work in e-prescribing. Yakimischak, speaking from Surescripts experience of growing from less than 10 percent of the nation’s office-based physicians on its network in 2008 to 69 percent in 2012, stated that scalability means you need to get it right in the beginning. It is hard to make big changes once scale is achieved, he noted. He also recognized that standards are necessary but not sufficient. All standards are open to interpretation, he said, and poor implementation breaks economies of scale.
Joe Ganley, the Vice President of Federal Affairs for McKesson spoke alongside Dan Haley, the Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs for athenahealth. They talked about the Commonwell Health Alliance, and the goals they are working toward together, as competitors, in order to achieve the best outcome for patients and health IT companies. Ganley remarked that the healthcare industry is far behind other industries in regards to interoperability. Haley questioned why people have lower expectations for technology when it comes to healthcare, and added that it is nonsense to blame the complicated nature of healthcare for the relatively slow pace of progress. Bringing up meaningful use, Haley declared that the government should stop paying doctors to buy technologies that do not exchange information with each other.
