I’ve been saying it for years. The regional Health Information Exchange (HIE) should be your first stop for interop. That’s especially true when it comes to quality measurement. Patients are going to get care in many settings and their data is going to be stored in many EHRs. According to today’s guest, a sick Medicare patient may see 6-7 doctors in a given year! Proper quality measurement will require every hospital and every practice to proactively connect with one another AND solve the underlying data quality problems. FACT: It’ll never happen.
I know what you’re thinking. That’s why we need to have interoperability in healthcare, right!? Well, as Thomas Edison said, “opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Healthcare interoperability has already been solved, but it requires a lot of hard work and we don’t like that.
The good news is that there are strong HIEs operating across the country and they’re in the business of doing that hard work for you. On today’s episode, we talk with John D’Amore, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Diameter Health, about the role of HIEs in healthcare quality measurement. We discuss:
- Why HIEs are the right place to start when it comes to quality measurement
- Why it’s important to think about quality measurement and clinical-decision support as 2-sides of the same coin
- Why we’ll never have ubiquitous interop between all providers and all EHRs
- Why the ATM is a terrible analogy for healthcare interop
- Why data quality is such an important and misunderstood part of our interop and quality measure issues
- How the ONC and CMS NPRMs create opportunities and barriers for HIEs and quality measurement
- How health plans are utilizing HIE data to support HEDIS-measurement and other workflows.
- What NCQA is doing to support data aggregators and exchanges to enable the exchange of clinical data for measurement
- Why you might want to check out the NCQA & HL7 Digital Quality Summit in Boston July 16-18.
About John D’Amore
John D’Amore, MS has over a decade of experience providing informatics and strategic insight to healthcare organizations. He is co-founder, chief strategy officer and president of Diameter Health and is dedicated to improving healthcare quality and efficiency through the intelligent use of data. John has published on best practices in population health and presented at national forums on how information technology can improve medical outcomes. He is a technical advisor to the National Committee for Quality Assurance and a primary editor of HL7’s standard for care summaries, the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture. He holds a biochemistry degree from Harvard University and a graduate degree in clinical informatics from the University of Texas, School of Biomedical Informatics.
About Diameter Health
Diameter Health enables clinical insight through the normalization, cleansing, deduplication and enrichment of clinical data from across the care continuum. This creates a single, unified source of longitudinal structured patient information for improved care and actionable analytics. The Diameter Health platform empowers organizations that depend on multi-source data streams, such as Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), health systems and health plans, to realize greater value from their data. For more information, visit the website www.diameterhealth.com or email info@diameterhealth.com.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiameterHealth
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/diameter-health
Links and Resources
Heading to the NCQA Digital Quality Summit in Boston this July 16-18? You can find John D’Amore moderating a panel titled, “eCQMs and ECDS: How digital innovation is moving quality to the next level.” Diameter Health is also sponsoring the third annual conference.
Interested in learning about strategies for successful clinical data integration? John D’Amore will co-present an AHIP webinar along with Adam Rossbach, Chief Technical Strategist at Ohio Health Information Partnership/CliniSync HIE. Those interested in attending can register here.
Episode 23: Quality Measures: Past, Present and Future w/ John D’Amore
Episode 25: Digital Quality Measures 2.0 w/ Rick Moore of NCQA
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