When I was growing up in Texas I remember that we used to have Pep Rallies before our major sporting events. The idea behind a pep rally is to get the juices flowing and get fans engaged and cheering for the home team. On Thursday this week the West Health Institute and the ONC are hosting “Health care Innovation Day, HCI-DC 2014: Igniting an Interoperable Health Care System” where the purpose is to get people cheering for interoperability between EHRs, health IT systems, medical devices, and related technologies.
What I love is that this event is being held to “Drive demand for an interoperable health care system”. Interoperability can happen at process levels, system levels, software levels, and many other levels. I get the feeling that we’ll be talking more about systems and software instead of the (arguably more important) process, training, workflow, and other levels but it’s a great start.
Kudos to West Health and ONC for focusing on demand, it’s the key problem.
The event, like most hosted by West Health and ONC, will include a “who’s who” of major figures from government, non-governmental organizations, and commercial sectors. If you want to meet the movers and shakers of health IT, it’s worth attending. Here’s the general agenda for the various panels:
- 9:00 Perspectives from the Point of Care: Hear from caregivers and patients about challenges they’ve faced due to a lack of interoperable devices, systems and software.
- 10:20 The Business Imperative for Interoperability: Leading hospital CEOs discuss the role of medical interoperability in improving patient care and lowering costs, and plans for an interoperable healthcare system.
- 11:20 Fireside Chat: ONC/FDA Efforts Toward Interoperability: Understand perspectives from key government agencies on recent developments, lessons learned and issues to address in transforming healthcare delivery.
- 1:45 Keynote: Malcolm Gladwell, Author
- 2:45 What We Can Learn from Other Industries: From national security, to the movie business and global finance, industry leaders share lessons learned and ideas for innovation that can be applied to the healthcare system.
- 4:00 The Innovation Paradigm for Vendors: Hear from leading developers on the age-old debate of market forces versus mandated forces and what the innovation paradigm means to them.
- 4:45 The Big (Data) Picture for Health Care Delivery: Interoperability may bring an overwhelming amount of data to physicians, patients, hospitals and the healthcare system as a whole. Are we ready to handle it?
Let’s take a look at the panels from a more realistic perspective and what will actually be said:
- 9:00 Patients complain to anyone that will listen that they have to enter data multiple times and can’t access their own records as easily as accessing an ATM, doctors complain they don’t have access to records when they need it, don’t have data on their iPads and iPhones or mobile devices, and have to resort to faxes.
- 10:20 The hospital buyers of big EHR systems complain to the vendors that their data is held hostage and they can’t use data across multiple vendors’ software
- 11:20 The government explains how important …read more
