Interoperability (202)

Jonathan French, HIMSS' senior director of public policy, urges HIMSS members interested in public policy advocacy to join committees or workgroups related to their topic of interest.

Fragmented systems hinder care in tribal regions, and Brenda Hood, client experience analyst at HealtHIE Nevada, says that seamless data exchange is essential to closing care gaps and improving access to treatment.

Josh Wilda, University of Iowa Health Care's AVP for information systems and CIDO, says that healthcare organizations can maximize TEFCA access to streamline and improve data exchange costs.

Founder Changemaker awardee Helen Hill, SEMHIE VP/CIO and founder of the HIMSS Michigan chapter, helped launch MiHIN (the Michigan health information exchange), chairs its interoperability task force and runs a small sub-HIE in the MiHIN system.

Cambridge Health Alliance's Dr. Hannah Galvin, Health Equity Changemaker Award recipient, talks about her work in advancing standards that would allow patients to selectively share health data to protect sensitive information.

Dr. Jonathan Nebeker, CMIO at the Department of Veterans Affairs, says the VA seeks to engage with health systems, vendors and others to develop interoperability solutions that can connect veterans to community-based benefits.

All publicly funded Italian hospitals have adopted HIMSS' EMRAM and INFRAM models to assess their digital maturity and demonstrate the benefits of digitization, says Elena Sini, HIMSS board chair and group CIO at Italy's GVM Care and Research.

HIMSS26 attendees share their learnings about AI, interoperability and other hot healthcare topics at the conference.

Amy Gleason of U.S. DOGE Service and CMS says the CMS Health Technology Ecosystem will provide a single patient access point powered by modern identity systems. This will replace portal logins and enable seamless data sharing.

Dr. Thomas Keane, assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health IT, describes his plans for the conference and talks about TEFCA, HTI-4, HTI-5, imaging data, behavioral health exchange and more.

Kevin Ritter, EVP for CareInMotion at Altera Digital Health, offers some answers and discusses how to tackle the challenges of data fragmentation and silos that block a unified patient view and impede coordinated care.

Payer-provider collaboration in data exchange is being mandated and payers must speed up the prior authorization process, says Courtney Yeakel, chief product officer of the Payer Unit at Veradigm.