Health Care Innovation Day Highlights Interoperability

WASHINGTON — Health Care Innovation Day 2014 (HCI DC 2014), held Feb. 6 in Washington, D.C., focused on information technology and the driving forces of health care interoperability. Titled “Igniting an Interoperable Health Care System,” the public conference was hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Gary and Mary West Health Institute.

Stakeholders at the full-day conference discussed the challenges of sharing health care information as well as potential solutions to medical interoperability. Providing a safe and effective system to share medical information has not been a simple feat.

"We know that interoperable information technology and device innovation can help to improve quality and patient safety across the health care system and for each individual patient," said Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health IT, in a statement. "We are excited at the opportunity to partner with the West Health Institute to bring together leaders in health care to explore our progress, potential and possible solutions to enable us all to achieve medical interoperability."

Keynote speakers at the event included best selling author Malcolm Gladwell, Nick Valeriani, chief executive of West Health, and Karen DeSalvo, national coordinator for health information technology.

Dave Cassel, senior interoperability engineer with Epic Systems, and David McCallie, director of the Cerner Medical Informatics Institute, led the panel Hot Topic Debate: The Innovation Paradigm for Developers. The engineers discussed the impact of interoperability standards on innovation and development in the field.

“When you need to get information from one system to another, standards are absolutely essential,” Cassel said.

Cassel believes that standards are not necessarily in conflict with innovation. The way information is moved back and fourth, Cassel said, is largely secondary to moving the information in a secure and efficient manner.

Developers are often tempted to use the latest technologies that come on to the market and push the limits on regulations and standards. But any changes must be done judicially, Cassel said.

“What limits innovation is not the standards,” he said. “It’s changes to standards that we need to be careful of.”

McCallie, on the other hand, said he believes that major changes should be made to increase the efficiency of interoperability and the health care industry needs to rethink the core of how medical information is moved.

“It’s like the very first cell network,” he said. “You could use your cell phone in the core of Manhattan, but outside of that it doesn’t work.”

McCallie said he would like to see an open ecosystem among the systems. His organization will continue to bring innovative methods to increase interoperability, he said.

“We’re going to be looking at ways that we can spur the industry,” McCallie said.