Health IT

Meditech executive explains how interoperability drives public health (Q&A)

"I think the analytics engines that are driving electronic health records are even driving those that are aggregating data from multiple sources that potentially have a very meaningful and powerful impact on public health."

interoperability

 

All the electronic health records vendors are talking about interoperability these days. But what are they doing to encourage and achieve better data flow between competing products so their hospital and practitioner customers can share patient information more easily and securely?

In part 2 of this interview with Helen Waters, Meditech’s vice president of sales and marketing discusses the Westwood, Massachusetts-based company’s reputation, what Meditech is doing about interoperability, how data exchange can aid public health and what you can expect to see at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference later this month.

Here is an edited transcript of the conversation.

MedCity News: Meditech, in the past, from what I’ve heard — and I don’t know if you’ve heard the same thing — had a reputation for being hard to interface with.

Waters: Yes, I’ve definitely heard it before, and I’m chuckling because I’ve been here for 25 years and a lot of those years were in the field. I think that reputation was born out of a lot of best-of-breed systems, which [led to people being] frustrated. Eventually, we would end up replacing [those systems] with our tools, whether it was standalone lab or pharmacy, because the integration is what people really saw a lot of value in.

MedCity News: Best-of-breed was the popular way to go in the early 2000s and probably again early this decade. The pendulum swings back and forth quite a bit.

Waters: It does. It absolutely does. But to your point about interoperability, we like to say that in addition to being in this industry and loving it for as many years that we have, we’re patients, consumers our family members are and we subscribe heavily to the fact that the data has the right to go with the patient to be delivered to the next caregiver, whether they’re using our system or someone else’s, in order to provide the most comprehensive, good clinical decision-making that someone can give. So we have in the history of the last 15 years written about 200,000 other vendor interfaces. We are demonstrating at HIMSS this year transactions with [Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources] FHIR-based APIs.

We’re a member of the CommonWell Health Alliance. You know, we’ve been really out promoting the fact that we believe that the industry as a whole has been burdened to reduce costs. And the way to reduce costs isn’t just to rip and replace every system that’s out there so we get to a common system, but to be able to exchange information and provide access within the clinician workflow that’s friendly, that’s expedient and that provides the right data at the right time to enable a good quality of care encounter, ultimately, hopefully reducing cost and eliminating redundancy and waste in healthcare. We’re pretty big into interoperability.

We ourselves have been a member of the KLAS interoperability project, which is another collaborative with all the private-sector provider organizations and the top vendors in the industry getting together to cover and talk about this topic, but on a national level we’ve been very compliant with the [Meaningful Use]regulations, both one, two and will be with three. In addition to that, we’ve pioneered again the connection of FHIR as an industry API standard and a founding member of the Argonaut Project.

MedCity News: The perception of CommonWell was that it was just all the other vendors ganging up on Epic Systems. But CommonWell has since agreed to use the Carequality Interoperability Framework.

Waters: Yes. We’re going to connect directly to it as well. That really removes any and the barriers of any one of the bigger players in particular having any obstructions to connectivity. You have CommonWell. You have Carequality. We have FHIR, really eliminating another level of complexity when the API is open.

We were a founding member of that Argonaut FHIR project. We’re going to have a working model at HIMSS in the Interoperability Showcase to demonstrate the participation and highlight an opioid use case, which is perfect for it in a really practical way.

MedCity News: Oh, that’s a good use case.

Waters: It’s a really good one, I agree. It’s a big problem for the industry to be trying to solve. We’re excited about the fact that CommonWell Health Alliance and Carequality are linking together, which ultimately links back up Epic to the open platform with these other guys. It doesn’t necessitate everyone just constantly ripping and replacing.

MedCity News: It’s interesting that you mentioned the public health use case. That got me thinking back to the Flint water crisis, which was actually found by a local doctor in Michigan, pieced together evidence from EHRs. You don’t necessarily sell yourself as a way to improve public health or for public health surveillance but that’s really an excellent use case and an argument for interoperability.

Waters: No question there. There are so many good use cases for it, and the Flint one was another good example, but I think it I think it’s happening nationally. We’re collectively as a vendor community capturing so much information. It’s being stored in very robust data warehouses. It’s being stored across facilities both Meditech and non-Meditech in terms of SQL relational databases. They’re able to join up information in tables from multiple sources. So I think the analytics engines that are driving electronic health records are even driving those that are aggregating data from multiple sources that potentially have a very meaningful and powerful impact on public health.

I think Ebola is another good example of how to make sure you can be attentive to what needed to be tracked and managed and then have quick reporting and extraction to CDC and other places. There are some unintended benefits beyond this parochial local healthcare organizations’ side to population health concepts and driving better public health outcomes.

Photo: Flickr user Tsahi Levent-Levi

Shares0
Shares0