Questions from MMIS: Next Steps for HIEs
Posted by 
Share this Post
Marty came away from the MMIS Conference with lots of questions about how HIEs are moving forward
Well, I just got back from the Medicaid MMIS conference (Medicaid Management Information Systems) and have some thoughts rolling around in my head.
As providers, payers and federal & state agencies grapple with the Affordable Care Act, Meaningful Use, Collaborative Care, Patient 360 and the Medical Home, conferences like this are quite valuable. It seems that everyone is very interested in health information exchanges (HIEs).
There’s a ton of discussion on legislation such as the 2009 American Recovery & Redevelopment Act (ARRA), and the related Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act. (These are only two of about 750,000 TLAs (three-letter acronymns) and ETLAs (extended TLAs) and LETLAs (longer ETLAs) I heard during this conference. There are more than you can count!)
I was encouraged to hear the driving passion behind improving healthcare and preventing disease. But right behind those driving passions are a slew of questions I mention below.
The content at the conference was good, with many presentations made by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) staff directly, and the audiences seemed quite dialed in. However the content was mostly “status reports.” Presenters explained, “This is where we are today, this is how this legislation is progressing and this is how this TLA impacts this ETLA,” etc.
I’d hoped to see more reports of, “This is what we’ve done to implement that standard, and here’s what we learned along the way.” This is understandable, because state representatives and big payers at the show are all wrestling with similar questions (see below) and there just aren’t that many answers yet.
See, the dust is just now settling on the CMS Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA) and how it relates to myriad other government standards/regulations.
So, the questions I heard (in no particular order of frequency or priority):
- How do we (state agencies) get started with MITA?
- How do we learn from early adopters, and have any other states actually succeeded at this yet?
- What do we do first, second, third, etc.?
- What is mandatory that we do now, vs later?
- Collaborative Care sounds great, and moving to better forms of prevention, care-giving and payments sounds like utopia, but how in the world will we ever get our providers to change, when they’re already under pressure to deliver better outcomes with less risk and lower costs?
- How will Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and The Medical Home change how our providers and payers work? Are they ready? Who goes first?
- As a payer, how will we survive and continue to add value while driving down costs and increasing efficiencies and quality?
- How will providers really comprehend, much less conform to, HIT’s Meaningful Use policy, and how can we ensure we’re implementing technologies and practices to avoid penalties and benefit from incentives?
- When will we be held accountable for which parts of HITECH, MITA, <add in a list of others here>?
- What will the penalties really be for non-compliance?
- I like the idea of a state-wide HIE and a National Health Information Network (NHIN), but how do we get funding to start our journey?
Well, where there’s chaos, there’s profit, and I expect us to see individual citizens, providers, payers, government agencies, and others benefit as we work through this massive move towards better care for our most vulnerable citizens. Stay tuned…
Did you attend MMIS? What was your perception? Are there other questions you would ask?
Leave a Response
Entries(RSS)