University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Cisco have formed an initiative to jointly develop an interoperability platform for sharing healthcare information among multiple entities.

The platform will be designed to enable health systems, providers and application vendors to share and integrate health data from multiple sources, and make pertinent patient information accessible when and where it’s needed for care through a highly secure process.

To advance interoperability across the healthcare industry, Cisco and UCSF will establish a collaborative center at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. At the center, staff from both entities, along with global health technology leaders, will be able to collectively test and scale the interoperability platform across different devices, IT systems and software.

“Fragmentation of information is one of the most challenging impediments in health care today,” Michael Blum, MD, UCSF associate vice chancellor for Informatics and director of the UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation, which houses this initiative for UCSF, said in a release. “In human terms, the consequences are enormous: the lack of complete information on our patients leads to poor, costly care, delays in diagnosis or treatment, and dissatisfied patients--all due to health information systems that cannot communicate with one another. In this age of apps, social media, and mobile communications, this status quo is completely unacceptable to both patients and providers. We plan to change all of that with this partnership.”

The initiative will leverage industry, healthcare and government relationships, including early industry partners. The platform initially will be piloted for patients at UCSF Medical Center and extended to other affiliated entities within UCSF Health.