Dan Soule

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are critical to the movement of patient data across systems and technical barriers — connecting payers, providers, and patients — making these exchanges the epicenter of many healthcare communities. Health Catalyst is committed to the long-term success of HIEs and will continue to invest in infrastructure, people, and processes to support healthcare community growth. Our position and action plan for connected communities and strong population health and value-based care initiatives include the following:

1. Our vision for HIE
2. The Health Catalyst roadmap and pathways to success
3. Our long-term commitment to HIE and HIE sustainability

Improving healthcare interoperability is a top priority for health systems today. Fundamental problems around improving interoperability include standardization of terminology and normalization of data to those standards. And, the volume of data healthcare IT systems produce exacerbates these problems.

While interoperability regulations focus on trying to make it easy to find and exchange patient data across multiple organizations and HIEs, the legislation’s lack of fine print and aggressive implementation timelines nearly ensures the proliferation of existing interoperability problems. This article discusses the biggest barriers to interoperability, possible solutions to interoperability problems, and why it matters.

Population health and value-based payment demand data from multiple sources and multiple organizations. Health systems must access information from across the continuum of care to accurately understand their patients’ healthcare needs beyond the acute-care setting (e.g., reports and results from primary care and specialists). While health system EHRs have a wealth of big-picture data about healthcare delivery (e.g., patient satisfaction, cost, and outcomes), HIEs add the clinical data (e.g., records and transactions) to round out the bigger picture of patient care, as well as the data sharing capabilities needed to disseminate the information.

By pairing HIE capability with an advanced analytics platform, a health system can leverage data to improve processes in four important outcomes improvement areas:
1. Workflow
2. Machine learning
3. Professional services
4. Data governance

Population health and value-based payment demand data from multiple sources and multiple organizations. Health systems must access information from across the continuum of care to accurately understand their patients’ healthcare needs beyond the acute-care setting (e.g., reports and results from primary care and specialists). While health system EHRs have a wealth of big-picture data about healthcare delivery (e.g., patient satisfaction, cost, and outcomes), HIEs add the clinical data (e.g., records and transactions) to round out the bigger picture of patient care, as well as the data sharing capabilities needed to disseminate the information.

By pairing HIE capability with an advanced analytics platform, a health system can leverage data to improve processes in four important outcomes improvement areas:

1. Workflow
2. Machine learning
3. Professional services
4. Data governance