The Buzz Word
Many of you that have been in the Skilled Nursing segment of the American healthcare delivery system have probably been noticing or hearing a new buzz word lately: interoperability”. If you stutter while pronouncing the mystical word don’t feel bad, even those of us that have been working with healthcare interoperability for decades find it a tongue twister at times; especially after having pronounced it 30 times in a day.
But please let me clarify something: interoperability is not a tongue twisting buzz word; it’s the only means by which you can set up your organization to be successful in the new rising Phoenix of the American healthcare system.
During the last few years I’ve had some key conversations with many hospital executives and healthcare IT professionals, among them: CEOs, CIOs, CMIOs, COOs, architects, strategists, etc. Most of the conversations have been around the topic of how to get the data required for being or becoming an effective ACO, or simply a provider highly conscientious of the well-being of their cared ones even beyond the walls of their facilities. Some of these providers weren’t aware of the ACO conversations since they didn’t participate in the CMS roundtables but they understood that the healthcare model had to drastically change.
The Journey of a thousand miles towards an ACO begins with one step.
Healthcare organizations are coming to realize that the programs stimulated by the ARRA – HITECH Act, Meaningful Use (MU) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), require something that they don’t have in sufficient quantities, the desired type or in the right format: “Data”.
In this post we’re going to focus primarily on the ACO analytics side of things although some of the same principles are applicable to Meaningful Use at its various stages.
I hope everyone is as excited this year as they were last year when the #HIT100 crowd-sourcing nomination was first launched just for fun during the 2011 4th of July weekend. At least I am.
Surprisingly, even to me, #HIT100 was the perfect summer thunderstorm. Participation was massive and it kept going through the month of July as if were never to end.
For those of you whom are new to the #HIT100 contest, this is just a way for the entire #HealthIT and #HITsm communities to reward those that have, for the past year, been supporting healthcare information technology through social media. Specifically those that have contributed with articles, books, blogging, tweeting, forming social networks and by just simply giving their best to improve healthcare one grain (or tweet) at a time.
Last year the tallying got a bit challenging because the rules were a bit too simple. This created difficulties in my being able to keep up with everything while at the same time performing my daily job.
In order to simplify the nomination counting, there will be some restrictions on how nominations will be counted.
1. The nomination is a simple tweet that should be written as follows: “I nominate @tweet_handle to the #HIT100 list. #HealthIT #HITsm” (omit the quotes in the tweet),
2. Only one twitter handle may be nominated in one tweet,
2. Simple RTs will be counted but “thank you” or “TY” RTs will not nor will RTs of RTs, so keep it simple,
3. The first round will be for the first top 250 nominees and this round will last 7 days or until the stream slows down,
4. From the first round the top 100 nominees will be listed on the #HIT100 list,
5. The second round will be executed the same way but only those that showed up in the #HIT100 list can be nominated,
6. The second round count will narrow down to the first 5 of the #HIT100 list. These 5 are this years champs!,
7. Last but not least, you must have lots of fun!
I’m looking forward to this years champs.
Does anyone remember who the top 5 were last year?
Regards,
@theEHRGuy (Michael Planchart)
Chad Johnson from the HL7 Standards blog reached out to interview me for his “5 Hot Topics in Healthcare Interoperability” post. It resulted in an outstanding article.
CCD is an acronym that stands for “Continuity of Care Document”. The CCD is a file that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, which could have one of 3 different structure levels. I will explain the various structure levels in Part III of this blog series. A CCD contains patient related information that could be electronically exchanged between healthcare providers, as well as, shared with the patients themselves.
The CCD template, derived from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Continuity of Care Record template or ASTM E2369-05 Standard Specification, or simply stated the CCR. The CCD is constrained by the HL7 (Health Level Seven) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). The CDA adheres to the HL7 V3.0 Reference Information Model or RIM.
