HIMSS13: A Fork in the Road - How Patients & Payment Are Forcing 'Open' Health IT

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn | iHealthBeat | March 11, 2013

This year feels like a fork in the road at HIMSS13, with disruptive forces of patients, digital health, mobility and open standards driving innovation and renewed energy at the annual conference...Without transparency (in health IT and health finance) and data liquidity, bending the cost curve will continue to elude the U.S. health system.

At the recently concluded annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in New Orleans, 34,696 got to experience a yin and yang vibe that embodies the disruption that the health care IT industry is undergoing. That is, the full-on face-off between developers of health IT that have been long-closed to data liquidity and those vendors innovating on open standards and cloud-based platforms.

The culmination of this was the announcement of the not-for-profit organization called the CommonWell Alliance, an affiliation of six health IT vendors who are planning to adopt, promote and certify standards for interoperable health information. The first vendors committing to the CommonWell pledge were Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway, McKesson and RelayHealth...

This year feels like a fork in the road at HIMSS13, with disruptive forces of patients, digital health, mobility and open standards driving innovation and renewed energy at the annual conference. There are two driving forces underneath this quake: growing consumerism in health care and the fact that the U.S. is, in a word, broke. We have entered the value-based health care era, with annual family deductibles as high as $10,000 and new entrants coming onto health insurance rolls. Without transparency (in health IT and health finance) and data liquidity, bending the cost curve will continue to elude the U.S. health system.

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Consumer Activism and an 'Open' Chargemaster System

According to HospitalBill.Org, aside from Maryland and California, no state, federal or local law limits what hospitals can charge their patients. Hospitals are free to set their own prices, and each hospital does so in a complex document called the 'chargemaster'. It is well established that chargemaster prices are inflated, vary widely from hospital to hospital, and often have no relation to the actual cost of providing care. Let's see action by consumers and the 'Open Health' community on developing 'open', transparent, and standardized state and/or national chargemaster systems for hospitals and clinics. Let's examine what healthcare provider organizations are charging more closely and get costs under control. We can do better. For more on this, see http://www.openhealthnews.com/blogs/groenpj/2013-03-11/open-hospital-cha...