Taking integration off the myth list

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine

System integration and interoperability were a significant part of the discussions during the recent CMIO Summit Clinical IT Leadership Forum in Boston, both at the podium and in the breaks between the presentations.

During a presentation titled “Health Information Exchange: How to Play, What to Gain,” David Cochran, MD, CEO and president of Vermont IT Leaders (VITL), reported that the Green Mountain State’s designated HIE has seen success in part because it’s a clinical program, not necessarily a technology program.

“The state is recasting how it does its information architecture both so [it] can communicate from program to program within the state, but also so that the architecture can communicate directly to the exchange, so we can share information across some of the state-based programs with the clinical programs that are out in the community,” he said.

Cochran’s fellow HIE presenter was Ben Stein, MD, president and CEO of the Long Island Patient Information eXchange (LIPIX). Stein described the New York organization’s distributed HIE model, in which clinical data flows from systems into a regional health information organization (RHIO) hub which transmits clinical patient data to those who have access to the data. LIPIX houses clinical information on 2.5 million unique patient records from 77 participating provider entities.

Unfortunately, when Stein went on to bust HIE myths, one of them was “Utilize standards to enable low-cost, high-quality integration.” It’s a myth because standards are just emerging, “so don’t rely too heavily on standards being the holy grail at this point,” he said.

Most organizations can’t hold up their health IT efforts by waiting for standards efforts to coalesce—and they shouldn’t, said Reid Coleman, MD, MIO at Lifespan Health Care in Rhode Island, during a presentation on meaningful use. As Lifespan worked toward qualifying for Stage 1 meaningful use incentives, “we LOINC’d our lab and diagnostic imaging, both orders and results,” among other efforts, he said.

Semantic interoperability is essential to getting better data and improving patient care, said Coleman. “What we produce in the hospital, [physicians] have to be able to load into their EMR and use. Data is like salt water. You can drown in it, you can’t drink it. You’ve got to filter it to make it useful. Only by putting data together with other data can we extract information.”

Click here for all of our in-depth coverage of the CMIO Summit. If you missed it, we’re in the very early planning stages for our next one. If you think integration and interoperability should take the spotlight, let me know.

Mary Stevens, Editor

mstevens@trimedmedia.com