Mastering Data Management

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While at the Summit, Stephanie Crowley, a Graphic Recorder, captured the direction of the conversations.

Allscripts, dbMotion and Initiate Systems hosted an invitation-only Healthcare IT Executive Summit at the five-star St. Regis hotel in San Francisco last week. The purpose: To bring together healthcare CIOs to share real-world experiences and facilitate discussion about strategies for interoperability.

After an evening of networking, great food and wine tasting, the seminar began with three presentations from IT leaders that shared the business and technology models driving their successful interoperability programs.

Each presentation focused on the process for business planning, stakeholder alignment, technology architecture, current and future results and the expected impact of ARRA on planned activities.

The lively discussion was very interesting and focused around these topics:

The Stimulus Impact: ARRA is a positive step in the right direction, but has resulted in distraction and delay to existing or near-term plans.  Don’t wait.

Timelines are aggressive and the major goals of meaningful use have already been outlined.  Perform a gap analysis of your current or planned EHR against the meaningful use matrix to determine readiness and whether plans need to change. Each presenter indicated that their plans have not changed, or have changed only slightly as a result of this type of analysis.

Business planning and funding: To gain cross-organizational support, focus your business plans on objectives for enabling the transition of care, electronically sharing results, connecting with physicians and patients, creating a single and accurate bill, and measuring performance and quality. These objectives drive efficiencies and quality of care and align with ARRA objectives.

The technology to get you there: The EHR alone will not be enough to achieve meaningful use. It’s not about transitioning from paper charts to electronic charts. You must have the infrastructure in place to facilitate bi-directional information exchange, results sharing, quality reporting and patient-centered care.

This requires an HIE-like infrastructure to semantically integrate the data and uniquely identify the patient across disparate systems. And it must provide secure access to the records while operating within existing workflows if possible.

Attendees found the Summit beneficial and left with renewed enthusiasm for their own HIT projects. One commented that they were reassured to see  that "We’re all more or less at the same place.”

Have you connected with other healthcare partners to hear their experiences? Have you applied any of their lessons to your own planning?