Editor’s note: TBR believes interoperability and the plethora of next-generation health IT solutions on the horizon will be interconnected to maximize each solution’s value, says Analyst John Caucis.

HAMPTON, N.H. – Interoperability and innovation take center stage as the prime movers in health IT at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and exhibition earlier this month in Las Vegas, where nearly 42,000 attendees and over 1,300 IT vendors networked and listened to industry leaders discuss the current and future trends in healthcare IT.

HIMSS 2016 included health IT professionals, executives from healthcare organizations and health IT vendors, clinicians (in fact, HIMSS 2016 saw the largest-ever number and proportion of attending clinicians), health IT journalists and others who participated in over 300 educational seminars, keynotes, thought leader and roundtable discussions, and other workshops.

TBR perspective

At HIMSS 2016, TBR visited with global IT hardware, software and services providers; consulting and professional services firms; small to midmarket technology and services vendors; and recent entrants into the health IT market. Our dialogue with these health IT participants crossed several topics, but the predominant theme running through these conversations, and throughout HIMSS 2016, was interoperability.

TBR has observed that following the recent gold rush in electronic health record (EHR) implementations, interoperability has emerged as a major focus of the health IT industry over the last year. Big data and security were similarly popular topics and top of mind for many attendees. Discussions at HIMSS 2016 also covered EHRs, emerging technologies (e.g., cloud, analytics, mobility and social media) and next-generation offerings (e.g., population health management and revenue cycle management), but the common thread weaving it all together was the overarching need to enhance data sharing across health IT systems.

TBR applauds the heavy focus of HIMSS 2016 on interoperability, as health IT systems that can communicate seamlessly with one another must precede new technology outlays if healthcare organizations are to optimize investments in the vast array of solutions showcased at HIMSS 2016.

TBR believes interoperability and the plethora of next-generation health IT solutions on the horizon will be interconnected to maximize each solution’s value.

Many healthcare CIOs in attendance acknowledged interoperability remains a challenge for their organizations, even as the IT systems (e.g., vendor-based EHR systems) have been put in place over the last several years and more providers use these common tools. This suggests that the key for realizing enhanced data sharing across health IT systems goes beyond the baseline technology to include not only more comprehensive standards for data exchange, but also a change in the mind-set of provider organizations to prioritize interoperability to truly advance healthcare and realize better patient outcomes.

Call for greater interoperability

Among the highlights of the conference for TBR were the two opening keynote addresses: the first given by Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell, and the second given by Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell. Burwell’s keynote speech was especially compelling as it called for industry leaders to pledge their commitment to the cause of interoperability. Burwell noted that each of the leading EHR providers (which provide 90% of the EHR systems currently in use by hospitals), five of the largest provider organizations in the U.S., healthcare systems across 46 states and several prominent professional organizations affirmed their support. The pledge was threefold: to enhance patient access to health data, support regulations to discourage data blocking and foster interoperability standards across the healthcare industry. Burwell’s address also reaffirmed the support of the federal government for efforts to drive greater interoperability across the healthcare sector.

Prior to last year’s HIMSS 2015 in Chicago, the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology released a 39-page report to Congress condemning entities or people who intentionally interfere with the use or exchange of patient or other health information without justification — a controversial practice known as “information blocking.” Opponents of information blocking have also claimed that some large-scale health providers have been guilty of hindering the exchange of health data, negatively impacting patients, medical researchers and fellow provider organizations. TBR believes it was critically important for the federal government to again make its presence felt at HIMSS as healthcare organizations continue to seek strong guidance and backing from public sector officials to enhancing interoperability. Burwell’s speech also comes a few months after the federal government awarded the long-awaited Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract, an EHR implementation and integration project that TBR believes has enough breadth and scale to inevitably accelerate the campaign for interoperability.

The renewed appeal to enable smooth exchange of patient data underscores the need for health IT vendors to expand their own suite of solutions to enable provider clients to realize greater interoperability, and several of the vendors TBR visited at HIMSS 2016 showcased offerings with new or enhanced application program interfaces or tools to expedite data sharing. TBR also believes health IT vendors will need to work more closely with one another to drive greater health data sharing by joining interoperability advocacy collaborations such as the CommonWell alliance (founded by Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Evident, Greenway Health, McKesson and Sunquist and launched in March 2013) and the Carequality Interoperability Framework constructed by The Sequoia Project (launched earlier in 2016 and including athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts).

Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, also gave an address in support of greater interoperability that sharply criticized the practice of information blocking. Halamka quipped that information blocking “is like the Loch Ness monster — talked about but seldom seen” and went on to suggest in jest that healthcare organizations ought to consider establishing a “chief information blocking officer” position in the C-Suite. Equally noteworthy for TBR, Halamka also addressed another key topic on the minds of HIMSS 2016 attendees: the notion that health IT vendors and providers must strive for greater innovation in IT solutions as well as the economics of healthcare delivery.

Innovation and security

TBR believes that over the next two to three years, there will be a fast-accelerating push for the implementation of new payment models (and the IT tools and infrastructure to support them) as the healthcare industry transitions from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement. Regulatory imperatives (Meaningful Use, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Affordable Care Act and ICD-10) helped kick-start the movement, but the primary driver emerging is the impetus on provider organizations to improve patient outcomes or else suffer financial penalties. Providers will have to deliver better care at a lower cost by shouldering greater responsibility for the care patients receive. Providers will need IT solutions that enable them to aggregate data across several care environments (within inpatient facilities but also in outpatient, urgent care, post-acute care and home-care facilities) as well as to and from payers.

Participants at HIMSS 2016 suggested that some EHR solutions currently in use may not provide sufficient support for this functionality and that providers will find themselves needing additional tools, applications and services on top of their EHR systems to improve data flows and access.

TBR expects health IT vendors will increasingly join and work together via the aforementioned CommonWell and Carequality Interoperability Framework alliances to develop these solutions, while others at HIMSS 2016 indicated they intend to introduce offerings with greater support for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (a set of standards for data formats recently introduced to enable smoother exchange of data across EHR systems). Health IT vendors will also increasingly adopt best practices and repurpose offerings from other vertical industry solutions, most notably the retail sector, to develop innovative solutions for the increasing consumerization of healthcare. Cloud-delivered solutions will also proliferate; healthcare providers will need the agility that cloud offers to ramp services up or down with minimal capital investment. The sharp increase in M&A activity among health systems is also driving demand for cloud as newly consolidated organizations will increasingly need to leverage a collectivized, shared set of IT resources.

Health IT vendors may experience some initial trepidation from provider clients about the perceived elevated risk in migrating to a cloud environment, especially from providers that have not been satisfied with their recent EHR implementation or providers rightly concerned about the security threats following the spate of recent health data breaches.

In the second of the two opening keynote addresses at HIMSS 2016, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell discussed how the proliferation of IT devices and the tremendous volume of data being generated from them are driving digital innovation in healthcare and will be vital elements of providers’ success realizing improved patient outcomes.

To further foster innovation, he suggested that healthcare providers adopt a culture more amenable to risk-taking while wringing cost out of their existing IT infrastructure to fund innovation projects. Dell also acknowledged another important problem facing the healthcare industry: how threats to data security are increasing with the explosion of healthcare-related devices. He noted that many healthcare providers are unprepared to deflect the ever-rising number and increasing sophistication of cyberthreats, further highlighting the need for vendors to weave security deeply into their health IT solutions.

TBR applauded the mention of security during this keynote as we believe data assurance is a critical issue that health IT vendors must elevate to be a strategic concern at the executive and board levels within their base of provider clients, especially given the steep fiscal penalties that providers face following a cyberattack.

(C) TBR

Technology Business Research, Inc. is a leading independent technology market research and consulting firm specializing in the business and financial analyses of hardware, software, professional services, telecom and enterprise network vendors, and operators. Serving a global clientele, TBR provides timely and actionable market research and business intelligence in a format that is uniquely tailored to clients’ needs. Our analysts are available to further address client-specific issues or information needs on an inquiry or proprietary consulting basis. TBR has been empowering corporate decision makers since 1996. For more information, please visit www.tbri.com.