Tomorrow from 9am to 4pm at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC, the Implementation Workgroup of the HIT Standards Committee will hold hearings to identify enablers and barriers to the adoption and implementation and standards.
We've assembled a great group from non-healthcare industries, providers, vendors and quality measurement organizations. Testimony will include
Non-Healthcare Industries Panel
Skip Best and Davis Miller, Covisint
Adam Bosworth, XML and SQL
Clarence So, Salesforce.com
Providers Panel
Andy Wiesenthal, MD, Kaiser Permanente (IDN)
Dick Taylor, MD, CMIO, Providence Health, Portland, OR (IDN)
Rick Warren, VP/CIO, Allegiance Health, MI (Community Hospital)
Lisa Bewley, RN, VP/CIO, Regional West Medical Center, Scotts Bluff, NE (Community Hospital)
Louis Spikol, MD, Allentown, PA (Small Practice)
Floyd "Tripp" Bradd, MD, Front Royal, VA (Small Practice)
Vendors Panel
Rick Ratliff, SureScripts
Arien Malec, Relay Health
Sean Nolan, MicroSoft
Girish Kuman, eClinicalWorks
Chris Stevens, Orion Health
Quality Measures Panel
Ralph Brindis, American College of Cardiology
Richard Gliklich, CEO, Outcome Sciences
Jesse Singer, NYC Health
Barbara Rabson, Massachusetts Health Quality Partners
Jack Bowhan, Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality
What kind of testimony can you expect?
In non-healthcare industries, standards have been used to coordinate the supply chain. What tools and techniques were used to encourage the entire manufacturing ecosystem to participate?
Do we need better educational materials such as implementation guides that include all the base standards so that there is no "indirection" - jumping between implementation guide websites and standards development organization websites?
Are there gaps in standards that need to be filled to encourage adoption in different healthcare environments?
The real purpose to the meeting is to encourage transparency and build a feedback loop that connects real world users of standards with the organizations that govern and create standards development.
During the meeting we'll kick off a new website that will enable the public to post comments about standards, privacy, and implementation experiences, including the ability to rank ideas via social networking tools. I'll post the URL to the new website tomorrow.
To participate in the meeting, join by audio conference or webcast.
I look forward to hearing your feedback!
2 comments:
I am always interested when vendors are involved in these discussions as I am challenged to understand their motivation for real change. They focus on shareholder value and maintaining their competive advantages, which infers maintaining propreitary systems and charging customers for any customimizations\integrations with other systems.
I am encouraged to see what the future holds and how such products will be changed. It appears there is traction and a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is like pulling teeth and short-term gains are hardly seen.
Thank you for keeping up with your blog. The information is interesting and I can relate it to my everyday responsibilities as an IT Director in the Healthcare industry.
The fact is that we live in an evironment where no single vendor rules the roost in Healthcare. This is a good thing for me, because competition breeds excellence, and that's what I want when I get care.
Maintenance of proprietary systems to lock in customers is an illusory gain for vendors. Often the result is difficulty in integrating with other systems, and that's not desirable way to be noticed. The heterogeny of systems makes life more complicated though because these systems all need to work together, and customers of healthcare IT expect them to do so. It's almost impossible to find care settings where integration isn't needed.
Vendors are rarely noticed because customers were easily able to integrate with another system, so I can see why making it easy might not be an obvious strategic move. However, what vendors do get noticed for is when they provide ways for their customers to work better, more efficiently or provide better care. Those are true competetive advantages. Vendors that make integration easy for their customers and themselves are better able to spend time innovating in other ways.
The best solution for everyone is to make it easy to connect HIT systems together. That way, vendors can focus on where the real added value occurs, in improving care.
The fact that so many vendors are participating in standards development though organizations like IHE, HITSP, and HL7 encourages me to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and as a patient, I expect to benefit from it.
I'm a Standards Geek for GE Healthcare. The opinions represented in this posting and on my blog are my own, and not that of my employer or the respective standards organizations that I work with.
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