This past week AEGIS attended and hosted a panel at the 2014 HealthTech Research Advisory & Council (HTRAC) – East Council Meeting held at the Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, VA.
AEGIS’ Senior Vice President, Mario Hyland (@interopguy), led a panel discussion on Data to Dollars: How Health Information Sharing, Interoperability and Standards can Improve Care. The panel included the following industry leaders:
- Ida Androwich, Professor, Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, Loyola University Chicago
- Jennifer Covich, CEO, eHealth Initiative
- David Kaelber, CMIO, Metro Health System
- Martin Prahl, Adviser & Health IT Consultant, Social Security Administration
A synopsis of the panelist active dialogue and discussion included:
- Consistent themes emerged around the issue of modifying care delivery, interoperability and reimbursement models. Value-based purchasing (or pay for performance), bundled payments, and accountable care organizations (ACOs) are different variations on the theme of reimbursing for results rather than transactions. Although there are clearly differences between these approaches to changing how care is provided and paid for, there is a common need to be able to track and measure patient outcomes.
- Current adoption of interoperability standards is low.
- Interoperability standards adoption will increase over the next few years (spurred by the requirements of the EHR meaningful-use criteria), hospitals have a more immediate need for these data.
- Leverage HIT investment to provide the data, measurement, and feedback mechanisms needed to support performance improvement.
AEGIS was asked to participate in this industry event because our its global expertise in interoperability, information sharing, standards, conformance and functional testing. Our ability to tackle and mitigate risks the multitude of challenges and barriers positioned us to address this prestigious panel and audience.
HTRAC’s mission is to provide executive level collaboration and information sharing on the most important IT issues facing healthcare organizations including:
- Use of new technologies like Cloud, Mobility, and EHR to improve patient care and reduce cost
- Security and Privacy of patient health and financial data
- Compliance with mandates including HITECH, HIPAA, PCI Sarbanes -Oxley
- Federal Legislation on Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), Meaningful Use, and Information Exchanges
AEGIS was one of five companies to participate in the HTRAC Technology Innovator Sandbox to showcase visual demos of the Developers Integration Lab (DIL) testing solution for health information exchange gateway, interoperability, and compatibility testing.