Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative

See the following -

Apple Is Quietly Working on Turning Your iPhone into the One-Stop Shop for All Your Medical Info

Christina Farr | CNBC | June 14, 2017

Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information — every doctor's visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command. No more logging into hospital websites or having to call your previous doctor to get them to forward all that information to your new one. Apple is working on making that scenario a reality...

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CommonWell Members to Build Healthcare APIs to Expand Service

Kate Monica | EHR Intelligence | February 15, 2017

CommonWell Health Alliance is set to expand as its existing services with agreements from 14 new members committed to building new healthcare application programming interfaces (APIs) for the health data exchange platform. “Although there is still much to be done before achieving the ‘ubiquitous interoperability’ CommonWell Members seek, the collective pursuit of that mission by our Members has created a unique culture of collaboration,” said Executive Director Jitin Asnaani...

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Halamka Discusses Three Disruptive Care Coordination Innovations In Use at Beth Israel

Would you buy an iPhone if the only apps that ran on it were written by Apple?   Maybe, but the functionality would not be very diverse. The same can be said of EHRs. Athena, Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and self developed EHRs such as BIDMC’s webOMR are purpose-built transaction engines for capturing data.  However, it is impossible for any single vendor to provide all the innovation required by the marketplace to support new models of care I’m a strong believer in the concept of third party modules that layer on top of traditional EHRs in the same way that apps run in the iPhone ecosystem...

Halamka on Enabling Nationwide Interoperability

...recently, the ONC Interoperability Roadmap, recognizing that the building blocks of universal interoperability could not be so neatly erected, leans on the idea of “coordinated governance” of networks. While these frameworks have paid homage to the concept of nationwide network as a “network of networks”, we have yet to crisply define the stitching needed to form this nationwide network quilt. This issue hasn’t been so pressing up until now because there were relatively few networks – the “last mile” problem was the bigger concern. Network formation is evolving rapidly, however, which has made more pressing the question of what it means to connect networks in a uniform way.

Halamka on MU3 Regs: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

On Friday March 20, CMS released the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program-Stage 3 and ONC released the 2015 Edition Health Information Technology (Health IT) Certification Criteria, 2015 Edition Base Electronic Health Record (EHR) Definition, and ONC Health IT Certification Program Modifications. Perhaps the most important statement in the entire 700+ pages is the following from the CMS rule:  "Stage 3 of meaningful use is expected to be the final stage and would incorporate portions of the prior stages into its requirements."

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Halamka on the Most Important Interoperability Story of 2016

You may have missed or not understood the implications of this press release.  Here's a guest post from Micky Tripathi, the CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative that explains everything you need to know: "This summary provides some additional information on the recently announced interoperability agreement between CommonWell and The Sequoia Project (Carequality).  For full disclosure, I am on the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project, a contractor to CommonWell, and participated in the discussions leading to the agreement.  The description below does not necessarily reflect the views of either of these organizations or any of the named vendors...

HL7 Launches Joint Argonaut Project to Advance FHIR

Press Release | Health Level Seven International (HL7) | December 4, 2014

Leading Health IT industry vendors and providers collaborate with HL7 to accelerate development and adoption of FHIR Read More »

Money Dries Up For HIEs, RECs

Anthony Brino | Healthcare IT News | May 29, 2014

Although about 90 percent of New Hampshire's providers are using EHRs, "the use of that EHR and the amounts of structured data elements that are accurately being recorded is still a little bit disparate across the state," Loughlin said.  Bridging that gap with a statewide network is the NH HIE, which has signed up 60 organizations on multi-year contracts...

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Number of Public HIEs Drop, Bringing Viability into Question

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 8, 2016

Despite federal funding that aided their creation, the number of community and state health information exchanges is declining as HIEs struggle to remain financially viable now that seed money has dried up. Those are among the results of a new national survey published in the July issue of Health Affairs that tracked community and state HIE efforts soon after federal funding ended. “We found 106 operational HIE efforts that, as a group, engaged more than one-third of all U.S. providers in 2014,” states the study’s authors...

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Stakeholders Look to Improve C-CDA as FHIR Matures

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 2, 2017

As the healthcare industry continues to wrestle with interoperability challenges, two standards are poised to play a central role in facilitating the electronic exchange of health information—one is a blunt tool for data sharing, while the other is a surgical instrument. First adopted in 2012 as part of the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT’s 2014 Edition final rule, the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) version 1.1—developed through the joint efforts of ONC and Health Level Seven (HL7) International—is now widely used among healthcare providers...

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The Golden Spike Part 2

John D. Halamka | Life As A Healthcare CIO | October 16, 2012

Today we made history in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.   At 11:35am Governor Deval and his physician sent the Governor's healthcare record from Massachusetts General Hospital to Baystate Medical Center. It arrived and was integrated into Baystate's Cerner medical record. Read More »

The Meaningful Use Stage 2 Finish Line

Hospitals across the country have until September 30 to complete their 2014 reporting period for Meaningful Use Stage 2. Recently Ashish Jha and Julia Adler-Milstein published important articles in Health Affairs about the current state of EHRs  and Health Information Exchange .  What can we learn about the status of Meaningful Use Stage 2 across the country? Read More »

The ONC 10 Year Vision

On June 5th 2014, ONC released  “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure." The plan is divided in 3 year goals, 6 year goals, and 10 year goals. Five specific tactics support the strategies. Below is a summary of the report and a few comments from my Massachusetts experience that support the reasonableness of the ONC goals.

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With Apple consulting Argonaut Project on health records, interoperability could get the push it needs

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | June 27, 2017

Apple is said to be working with the Argonaut Project to integrate more electronic health data with the iPhone, a move experts say could go a long way towards advancing medical record interoperability. Participants in the Argonaut Project – an HL7-led initiative focused on expanding the use of open standards for health data exchange, notably HL7's FHIR specification – are some of the industry’s most notable vendors and providers: Accenture, athenahealth, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Meditech, Surescripts, The Advisory Board Company, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, Intermountain Healthcare, Mayo Clinic, Partners HealthCare...

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