Direct HISP - HIE the Verb

Who precisely are you sending that message to? There is a little recognized problem in using legacy HL7 over VPNs to deliver data (lab results, image studies, reports, etc). The orderer is in the message regardless of whether you are trying to send to them or not. The CC list is in the message regardless as well. The attending, the primary, etc. all there but maybe not who you are routing to. Who are you routing it to? How is this a problem? In today's modern world of Software as a Service (SaaS), many of the EHRs get data delivery through a common gateway for many practices. If you route a message to a single practice with a locally installed EHR, then when the data source (e.g. hospital or an HIE as its proxy) sends a message to the practice, the practice endpoint and the EHR endpoint are one in the same. There is no confusion about who the message is for. When the EHR serves multiple practices is where we get the confusion. The endpoint of the practice is a spoke off of ...

The Real Use Case for Personal Health Records (PHR) I have been at this, HIE game, for a few years or so now. And when I go out and meet new people, I get the typical, "so, what do you do" question. Once I tell them and give a little explanation of what it means, about half of them have a follow-up question. There is only ever one follow-up question and it is always the same question "so, are you going to get rid of that clipboard of paperwork that I have to do over and over again every time I go to see a doctor". The fact that I only get one question from general consumers and it is always the same question tells me one thing. This is what matters to them. This is how they see their information making it from them to their provider today. This is what they want to eliminate by using HIE or a PHR. In essence, I see the HIE and PHR as one in the same. The HIE, in a fixed repository model, is a collection of "views" of the patient. We have a primary ...

Evolving HIE Beyond just replacing the fax machine   HIE can be more of a game changer for healthcare than just being a replacement for the fax machine. The route to being a game changer is to be an enabler of care management. That care management can come from a health plan (managed care organization), an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) like a Patient Centered Medical Home or Medicaid Health Home, or from the patient/consumer as care manager for themselves or as the caretaker of another.   To do this, I think the HIE needs to serve the following customers and their use cases. These are the healthcare providers for care coordination, the care manager in the role of managing care, the care management at a program management or quality improvement level, and the care management at a financial management level.     HIE must Support Provider-Patient Coordination Use Cases   Send patient data between provi...

A Lesson in Strategic Management of HIE Recently I was awarded "The Game Changer" award by the HIXNY collaborative RHIO, where I am the current COO. It was a very nice presentation including a letter of recognition from Senator Charles Schumer. In reflection though, I didn't "change the game". What I did was I continued to play the game long after the other regions around the state abandoned the statewide strategy for other pursuits. As a result, HIXNY is the only real implementation of the SHIN-NY standards. Strategic Management Many years ago, in a class on strategic management, we studied the varied aspects of strategy. Most of it was fairly basic common sense, but a couple of the more unusual aspects of strategic management that stuck with me were serendipity and sticktoitiveness. Thus, I try to never miss an opportunity that falls in my lap, and I try to be tenacious and never give up too soon. Managing Stakeholders and Expectations If I had ...

What happens when you version the standards for P2P exchange? One of the key value propositions of "HIE the noun", for example an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based regional patient-centric exchange, is that it abstracts between data providers and data consumers. Thus, if a new standard comes along, some can implement it and some can hold off. The HIE provides the abstraction between the two. There is no tight-coupling between trading partners. In the "we will all do the same thing peer to peer" model, doesn't it break when something new comes along? Otherwise, every P2P end-point needs to support every standard that emerges as they emerge and until everyone has it implemented, the world is frozen. That sounds an awful lot like where HIT is with ICD10 right now. Most systems seem to have tightly coupled to the ICD9 codes rather than having an abstraction in their system between internal coding and the outward facing standard codes, now they have trouble upg...

In " Ryba's 16 rules of effective HIE " published in Government Health IT, I recently wrote about what I believe to be the rules that can be used to define an HIE that is reusable across all use cases. I don't get into what technical implementation it supports or even what type of healthcare information is being exchanged. However, if your HIE complies with these rules, I believe you have a "fully effective" HIE. That said, if it does not, it may or may not be adequately effective for where the world is today. The point is, these rules are what I think exchanges, public or private, should comply with, or at least should be able to comply with, from a functional perspective. How soon you will need to meet all of them will probably be determined by market forces or government mandates in your area. While I left technology out of the rules, if you follow any of my previous writings, you know I of course believe that a services oriented architecture and enter...