3 Conditions that Must be Met to Make Interoperability a Reality

3 Conditions that Must be Met to Make Interoperability a Reality

The term “interoperability” holds different meanings for different people. While we all would agree that the primary goal of interoperability is to make sharing data easier in order to improve outcomes and lower costs, there are varying perceptions about what that looks like. FHIR has been great at giving us a common set of protocols and standards to work from, but how we connect and how data actually gets shared are still open challenges.
In a truly interoperable healthcare ecosystem, I strongly believe data wouldn’t need to be requested, aggregated, and validated each time it’s needed. And it wouldn’t be limited to specific…

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Health equity hindered by SDOH coding roadblocks

Health equity hindered by SDOH coding roadblocks

A new American Health Information Management Association study aimed at finding a better understanding of the operational realities of how social determinants of health data is used in real-world healthcare scenarios, finding a lack of standardization, insufficient training and limited cross-sector use.WHY IT MATTERS
The study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 2,600 AHIMA members and nonmembers from a pool of 41,000 potential respondents between August 24 and September 9, 2022.
Respondents included coding professionals; managers, directors and vice presidents of health information management; HIM team members and executives. 
SDOH data can offer additional insights to help enrich clinical decision-making…

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The Path Forward for Healthcare’s People Matching Problem

The Path Forward for Healthcare’s People Matching Problem

The following is a guest article by Rachel Podczervinski MS, RHIA, Vice President of Professional Services at Harris Data Integrity Solutions.
Efforts to identify the right path forward for healthcare’s patient matching problem are gaining a foothold as stakeholders from across the spectrum come together to remove obstacles and implement effective solutions. Most notably, in 2022, efforts by industry organizations like Patient ID Now led to the temporary removal of Section 510 from the U.S. House and Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS) appropriations bills. While it was ultimately reinserted in the final version, its initial removal…

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3 Care Orgs Tap EHR Implementations for Clinical Workflow Optimization

3 Care Orgs Tap EHR Implementations for Clinical Workflow Optimization

– With high levels of clinician burnout across the care continuum, healthcare organizations are leveraging EHR implementations for clinical workflow optimization. FAMILY CLINIC MOVES TO ECLINICALWORKS SYSTEM FOR SCALABILITY Care Choice Family Clinic, PLLC in Plano, TX, will implement a health IT system from EHR vendor eClinicalWorks’ to customize workflows and improve operational efficiency. The implementation is set to allow the new family practice to deliver comprehensive patient care and scale as needed. Care Choice Family Clinic cares for patients two years old and up, focusing on primary care, sick visits, and minor urgent care. “I had experience with eClinicalWorks at…

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Readers Write: Faster Horses? Let’s Think Different

Readers Write: Faster Horses? Let’s Think Different

Faster Horses? Let’s Think Different By Stuart Hanson
Stuart Hanson, MBA is CEO of Avaneer Health of Chicago, IL.

American industrialist and business magnate Henry Ford is purported to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The same could be said when it comes to what it’s going to take to transform the US healthcare system, one of the most administratively complex in the world.
When compared to other high-income nations, we spend the most, yet have poorer outcomes. While we have many initiatives in place to fix our current administrative…

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Singapore's iHiS taps Google Cloud, Accenture to drive healthcare innovation

Singapore’s iHiS taps Google Cloud, Accenture to drive healthcare innovation

Integrated Health Information Systems, Singapore’s national healthcare technology agency, has collaborated with Google Cloud and Accenture to promote the development of data-driven applications to “deliver more high-quality and digital-first healthcare experiences.”Accenture is helping deploy Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management platform, which will provide third-party developers access to data and services across iHiS’s managed systems to create new applications and capabilities. 
The resulting flexible API-based architecture from this collaboration will serve as a “connective tissue across data sources and applications,” as per iHiS assistant chief executive Alan Goh. 
Google Cloud has also built security features into the Apigee platform to provide iHiS full visibility over…

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Federal agencies offer updates on TEFCA, interoperability milestones

Federal agencies offer updates on TEFCA, interoperability milestones

On February 13, the government leaders thanked the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and six Qualified Health Information Networks (QHIN) for working to create a nationwide interoperability network under the 21st Century Cures Act. The ‘Network of Networks’ 
At the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, Secretary Xavier Becerra presented certificates of recognition to the CommonWell Health Alliance, eHealth Exchange, Epic TEFCA Interoperability Services, Health Gorilla, Kno2 and KONZA for moving into the pre-production testing process of the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement.
With the framework, ONC and the Sequoia Project, TEFCA’s recognized coordinating entity, seek to establish…

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Epic, eHealth Exchange and CommonWell among HHS-approved QHIN candidates

Epic, eHealth Exchange and CommonWell among HHS-approved QHIN candidates

A half-dozen organizations on Monday were approved by the Department of Health and Human Services as the inaugural batch of candidates to participate as qualified health information networks as part of ONC’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement.During a Feb. 13 event at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, six healthcare organizations were approved to implement TEFCA as prospective QHINs: CommonWell Health Alliance, eHealth Exchange, Epic TEFCA Interoperability Services, Health Gorilla, Kno2, and KONZA National Network.
In a blog post, National Coordinator for Health IT Micky Tripathi recognized those organizations, “for their willingness to voluntarily step up and meet the…

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95% of Certified Health IT Developers Met ONC Cures Act Deadline

95% of Certified Health IT Developers Met ONC Cures Act Deadline

– More than 95 percent of certified health IT developers met the Cures Act Final Rule compliance deadline to provide customers with new technology, according to an ONC HealthITBuzz blog post. The Cures Act Final Rule mandated many changes to the Certification Program, including four updates set to have long-lasting interoperability impacts on patients, clinicians, and developers. ONC Certified Health IT developers must: Advance interoperability for patients and providers through the use of FHIR-based application programming interfaces (APIs);Enable patients, providers, and other stakeholders to have access to consistent data elements represented in at least version one of the United States Core…

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High-Performance Computing Breaks the Genomics Bottleneck

High-Performance Computing Breaks the Genomics Bottleneck

Sequencing our 3.2 billion DNA base pairs is becoming increasingly crucial as genomic testing gains widespread acceptance. Advancements in genomics are improving the detection of mutations that can lead to illnesses, with the potential to revolutionize personalized medicine by enabling the development of more effective treatments for genetic disorders. High-performance computing is revolutionizing the field of genomics by accelerating the speed of analysis and processing of large-scale gene sequencing data sets. However, genomics is facing a massive Big Data problem. Scientists are struggling to process a growing volume of data as precision medicine turns to gene sequencing for individual patients….

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