The American Medical Association has founded the Integrated Health Model Initiative, a collaborative that brings the healthcare and technology sectors together around a shared data model.
Through IHMI, physicians can collect, organize, exchange and analyze useful patient data. Its online platform allows the data model to evolve and change with participants’ use and feedback.
Currently, IHMI will focus on areas like diabetes, asthma and hypertension.
A number of well-known participants have already signed up to join IHMI. These include Cerner, IBM, Intermountain Healthcare, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Informatics Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
“Ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the information used to manage a person’s care is a priority for Cerner, so we are happy to support this AMA initiative to improve the semantics of clinical data models,” David McCallie, Cerner’s senior vice president for medical informatics, said in a statement. “This represents a bold attempt to advance an important aspect of interoperability.”
As of right now, the AMA is focused on building groups around costly areas, providing a clinical validation process to find appropriate clinical frameworks and specifying a data model.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
IHMI will strive to address ongoing problems like inadequate data structures and poor interoperability. Ultimately, the AMA hopes it will help pave the way to better patient care.
“The collaborative effort of IHMI will help the health system learn how to collect, organize and exchange patient-centered data in a common structure that captures what is most important for improving care and long-term wellness, and transform the data into a rich stream of accessible and actionable information,” AMA CEO James Madara noted in a news release.
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