I have to admit, I’ve really enjoyed going through and making lists looking back on EMR and Health IT in 2011 and thinking about what is going to happen in EMR and Health IT in 2012. Thanks for everyone who has joined and added to the discussion. It’s been really great!

This next list might actually be the hardest one for me to create. I call it the 2012 EHR and Health IT Noise. You know what I’m talking about. The topics that are going to get talked to death, tweeted everywhere, but won’t really have any major impact on healthcare (at least in 2012). Some would call these distractions.

HIE – Yes, we’re going to hear more and more about HIE’s and their potential. 2012 will still enjoy all that federal grant money that was given to HIE’s. What will we see from it? Maybe a couple books describing lessons learned from all the money spent on trying to set up an HIE. If one or two HIE’s are successful and start sharing patient data with doctors I’ll be really impressed.

EHR Usability – In 2012 I predict we’re going to hear story after story about the lack of usability with EHR software. The complaints will start to pile up, but I don’t think any of that noise will do much to shift the usability of EHR software. It’s a really hard task to dramatically shift the usability of EHR software after the fact. I can’t see many of the legacy EHR accomplishing that shift.

Some new EMR startups may start to come into their own in 2012 with usable EHR software, but they likely won’t be heard above the noise of the other legacy EHR software that’s practically unusable. We’re in a selling spree cycle for EHR software, maybe 2013 will change that.

Mobile Health Apps – This is a little different noise than the others above. This will be noise because there will be so many mobile health apps out there in 2012 and none of them will really consolidate market share yet. I believe that a number of mobile health apps will start to differentiate themselves in 2012, but most people won’t know the difference. They’ll just hear all the noise and try and ignore it.

Meaningful Use – Oh wait, I already wrote about that one here. If you haven’t read the comments of that post, you should. Some good discussion.

Any other things you think will make noise in EMR and Health IT in 2012? I’d love to hear your additions.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jeremy Bikman. You can read more about the GE and Microsoft Venture on EMR and EHR.

Guest Post: Jeremy Bikman is Chairman at KATALUS Advisors, a strategic consulting firm focused on the healthcare vertical. We help vendors grow, guide hospitals into the future, and advise private equity groups on their investments. Our clients are found in North America, Europe, and Asia. www.KATALUSadvisors.com

Healthcare is being held hostage and it doesn’t even know it.

It is held hostage by burdensome regulations, by archaic practices, and (oddly enough) by technology itself. In this age of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, an age where anybody with internet access can connect to somebody else on the other side of the globe and share personal information and other data with the click of a mouse, it is impossible that you could visit a hospital in the next town over and they would be able to procure your personal health information as easily or as quickly.

Healthcare, globally and locally, is utterly huge and mind-blowingly complex, and thus absolutely needs the very best innovation of everybody involved. Yet, healthcare technology companies almost universally deliver products which are built on closed-minded concepts. They lock down their platforms, creating real barriers to interoperability, patient data exchange, and actual innovation. This is the present reality within, and across, practically every hospital on earth. The recently announced joint venture between GE and Microsoft offers hope of an alternate reality, one where hospitals can bring together data streams from all over the enterprise, while utilizing new innovations and technology as they see fit, including different best-of-breed sources.

Giving Hospitals a New Choice
There are huge flaws in how technology is delivered in healthcare today, flaws which impact quality of care within a hospital and across the entire industry irrespective of country or region. While the rest of the tech world is moving towards open platforms and collaborative delivery models, healthcare seems to be stuck in the dark ages of single-source solutions which compel all-or-nothing investments to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. Too often those investments fail. But, the more important question is why must hospitals be forced into all-or-nothing decisions in the first place? Why must they choose between integration and functionality, between a single platform, however mediocre, and a best-of-breed mix? We believe those are questions of the antiquated past and that brave new innovation can deliver a new avenue for hospitals who refuse to be painted into a corner. Hospitals shouldn’t have to choose between apples and oranges. They want, and should be able to get, both.

The Basics of the Joint Venture
Selected product lines from both companies’ health groups will be part of the new company. These products were chosen for their specific focus on “empowering connected patient-centric care.”

GE is contributing an interoperable clinical data model and decision support system via Qualibria. GE’s eHealth is an HIE solution in use at a large number of sites in North America. Microsoft is bringing Amalga to the table, which is a data aggregation platform which facilitates interoperability and a host of other advanced capabilities. Vergence and expreSSO come through Microsoft’s acquisition of Sentillion and provide strong context management and single sign-on solutions. The strategy appears to be one of leveraging Microsoft’s platform technology (Amalga) to underpin GE’s clinical depth (Qualibria, eHealth). Additionally, this model will allow hospitals and vendors to integrate best-of-breed 3rd party products into the ecosystem as they see fit. This mix of products and capabilities will enable a true best-of-breed environment emerge while still having the core elements of integration as well. This ecosystem will be powered by the partnership’s own applications and those built by ISVs. No other major vendor offers this unique model and set of abilities, although Allscripts is the one traditional EMR vendor that is building a strategy of accepting of 3rd party solutions.

Tackling the Big Problems

No one is saying that this joint venture is guaranteed to be a resounding success. However, we applaud the visionary model and risks this new team is taking. It looks like they want to address all the big hairy obstacles that every provider organization, region, and nation is facing. Big data? Absolutely. Enterprise analytics and business intelligence? Yes. Clinical decision support? For sure. Population management? You bet. Nobody else in the industry has shown they can tackle these issues even though every hospital is clamoring for this type of model. So why not this joint venture between GE and Microsoft? We say good luck, and more power to them.

The principals of KATALUS Advisors have worked with hundreds of healthcare organizations, vendors, and other consulting firms across the globe. The opinions expressed here are our own and are not intended to promote any specific vendor and do not reflect those of any other organization or individual.

I think people have enjoyed a collection of my best tweets from the healthcare IT and EMR conferences I’ve been attending. If you don’t like them, let me know in the comments. I think they’re interesting since they’re nuggets of interesting topics. The following tweets come from the Digital Health Conference in New York. It’s been a really well attended event and includes a lot of the real health IT movers and shakers in the New York healthcare scene. Plus, they’ve had some really great content as well.

Here goes (with my comments after the tweet):

I’ll be interested to see http://t.co/EnvXwoJ5 evolve and start sharing clinical provider quality information. #dhc11

December 1, 2011 6:24 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Healthcare.gov is an interesting site. Still too new to decide its impact though.

Todd Park highlighting all of the healthcare data that the government makes available in APIs. #dhc11

December 1, 2011 6:34 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Todd Park did make a pretty compelling case for the healthcare data they’re going to make available from the government and it seems like they’re just getting started. I could see a lot of startups leverage that data in their companies. I wonder what assurance an entrepreneur will get that the data won’t get yanked.

Great example by Todd Park of how mobile health can change healthcare using the asthma example. #dhc11

December 1, 2011 6:53 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Simple examples like this is why mobile health is so fascinating.

Standing O for Todd Park’s keynote at #dhc11

December 1, 2011 7:06 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Todd Park really did do a great job. Attendees were commenting on how good he’d done all day. As Matthew Browning said, Practice Makes Perfect!

Standing room only for #dhc11 session on HIE event detection and provider notification. http://t.co/aE6rwRMW

December 1, 2011 8:27 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Obviously a lot of interest in the HIE stuff and in the notifications that they can do.

Did I hear right that NYC metro area has 4 RHIOs? #dhc11 RHIO is HIE for those not familiar with RHIO

December 1, 2011 8:43 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

I know that NYC is large and has a lot of people, but I’m having a hard time understanding how it has 4 RHIO. Are there 4 regions in NYC? I’m sure there’s a long political story behind it.

Dr. Calman hits the nail on the head-tech. is an enabler, doesn’t provide context. #DHC11

December 1, 2011 8:25 am via LinkedInReplyRetweetFavorite

@PeachBytes5

Babette Peach

This is why we’ll always need doctors. It’s just how they do what they do that will change.

I love that people are talking about concern over being flooded with information when right now were not sending any info. #dhc11

December 1, 2011 8:51 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Such a good point. If they were actually getting all that information then they’d have reason to complain. Although, we can’t make the systems filter the flood properly when there’s no flood.

I’d never heard @MatthewBrowning tell his @yournurseison story. Fun to hear. #dhc11 #HITStartups

December 1, 2011 11:27 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Great funding story. I bet there’s even more to it than he shared. I’ll have to get him to share the rest some time.

We bring a little Rock n Roll rhythm to the slow dancing healthcare industry. -@matthewbrowning #dhc11

December 1, 2011 11:30 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@ehrandhit

EMR, EHR and HIT

Great quote from Matthew. I don’t mind a little slow dancing, but the dance floor usually empties for the slow songs and is hopping with the rock songs. This is a pretty systemic problem in healthcare. I met one healthcare salesperson who said he was just contacted about a deal he’d worked on 3 years ago with a hospital. They contacted him to say that they’d finally closed the deal. Too bad this sales person is no longer at the company.

Time again for our weekend EHR Twitter round up. Let the fun begin.

@ahier – Brian Ahier
#EHR’s need encryption says @HealthPrivacy to Senate panel bitly.com/rTnx6s

Is there an EHR software that doesn’t use encryption? Is there a doctor’s office that’s paying for an EHR that doesn’t use encryption? Certainly not all EHR encryption implementations are created equal. In fact, I wish that things like encrypting data were part of an EHR certification. Why? Cause that’s something you can actually certify in a meaningful manner.

@drmikesevilla – Mike Sevilla, MD
RT @SeattleMamaDoc Computers all down in the exam rooms today. One major limitation of an EMR/EHR (dependence on a computer)

Definitely is one challenge with an EMR/EHR. I wonder how many patients were seen without the chart, because it couldn’t be found quickly. There are always pros and cons to IT. It does highlight the need to have a well thought out plan for how you’re going to care for patients when your EHR is down.

@iWatch – iWatch News
State health exchanges might not be sustainable after $548M in stimulus money runs out: bit.ly/t9QfSl #HIE #EHR

Wait, so changing the name of them from RHIO to HIE didn’t solve any of the problems with these exchanges? Oh yes, I forgot to mention the extra $548 million to help solve the problems. I think this best illustrates that money isn’t the issue or at least there are more issues with HIE than just the money.

Jeremy Bikman from KATALUS Advisors wrote this interesting comment on a LinkedIn discussion I was participating in:

Perhaps there is a place for MUMPS but only if healthcare continues to thumb its nose at the prevailing technology trends. It’s hard for me to envision healthcare to continue to embrace a technology that doesn’t like to play nicely with other non-MUMPS systems. If there were real advantages to it you would see a fair number of high tech firms utilizing it (Facebook, salesforce.com, Twitter, Spotify, etc).

If your goal is to have an enterprise system with a database that has some scale to it and certainly has good speed, and you don’t really care about interoperability with other systems, then MUMPS is certainly a good viable option. But IMO, the days of healthcare IT being insular, and moving out of phase with the rest of the tech world, are numbered.

I found this comment incredibly interesting. Mostly because I’ve never personally believed that the fact that many of the larger healthcare IT and EMR systems are built on MUMPS was any part of the reason why healthcare entities aren’t interoperable. I’m a tech guy by background, but I’ve never worked on a MUMPS software system myself so I don’t have first hand knowledge of MUMPS in particular. However, it seems wrong to “blame” MUMPS on the lack of healthcare data interoperability.

I guess the way I look at it is that no matter which database back end you have, you’re always going to need some front end interface to take care of the transport of the healthcare data to another system. Is this any harder with MUMPS than another SQL or even NOSQL database? From my experience it shouldn’t matter. I’d love to hear if there are reasons why it is harder.

I also don’t want to give the impression that Jeremy is trying to say that MUMPS is the only reason that healthcare IT has been so insular and closed. I’m pretty sure he agrees with me that a lot of other factors that have stopped healthcare from sharing data. I just don’t believe that MUMPS is one of those reasons.

Of course, the question of whether MUMPS should continue in healthcare is a different question. In fact, I wrote about MUMPS in healthcare IT and EMR here.

What are your thoughts? Is MUMPS the problem with healthcare interoperability? What are the other reasons stopping healthcare interoperability?

Update: Jeremy Bikman provided the following clarifying comment in the comments of this post:
Good points John. I really should have clarified. MUMPS is not really the issue (although I still stand by my assertion that if it was such a superior technology you’d see it all over Silicon Valley, RTP, etc). The main issue is really with the walled garden (w/ razor wire and machine guns along the top) approach of the major EMR/HIS vendors that have it as their foundation.

The more control you exert over your clients and the harder you make it to connect with other systems, the more money you can make…at least in the short-term.

John’s thought: I still look forward to the discussion around MUMPS and interoperability and healthcare interoperability in general.

The following is part of an email interaction I had with an EHR vendor about the future of CCD. Of course, I can never let strong opinions go unpublished. So I asked if I could put this on my site. I have a feeling there will be many people who have a different view of CCD and how these standards will play out. I’d certainly be happy to publish an opposing view as well. My contact page is here. I’m interested to hear other view points on the subject.

Stage 1 MU allowed either CCR or CCD. Stage 2, and the short term efforts will require CCD. The jury is still out on what Stage 3 of MU will focus upon. Many at the ONC can see that the CCD will never have the flexibility to deliver. These are largely the same people that facilitated the Direct Project initiatives.

I still predict that it is inevitable that the data will become uncoupled from unwieldy, anachronistic document structures. That will be the only means to get to true information portability that can deliver patient-centric use of the information. The CCD will still be around for a while to come, just as CD’s are still around for music sharing. For now, we have to have the CCD to preserve legacy, industry-centric control of the information.

John Halamka has a couple of recent posts that do a good job of explaining what is evolving…. http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/09/september-hit-standards-committee.html and http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/10/cool-technology-of-week.html . Both of these contain links to some very interesting information. When the ONC proceeded to issue an advanced notice of rulemaking, the industry power elites became enraged. http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2011/9/22/groups-urge-onc-not-to-include-metadata-standards-in-stage-2.aspx

Technology delivering to patients will eventually win out just as the open-platform WWW won out over proprietary CompuServe. http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/onc-metadata-ehr-meaningful-use-43021-1.html Once we have a means to truly exchange the content without the overhead associated with the CCD/RIM crap, we will see a revolution in healthcare similar to the social networking phenomenon.

Again, the whole CCD/CDA will stick around to support legacy information needs, but it will eventually be largely eclipsed by more straight-forward solutions that don’t require a team of consultants and IT engineers to implement.

Today at MGMA, Fujitsu together with Osmosyz announced a new scanner that supports the relatively new CDA “Unstructured Document” HL7 standard at MGMA 2011. I must admit that the press release is a little intense. However, I find what they’re doing with a hardware product to support HIE is quite interesting.

I don’t want the title of this post to be misleading. While certainly HIE has generally become synonymous with some large health information exchange entity, in this case I’m describing a hardware device (a smart scanner if you will) that acts as a small health information exchange. Basically, it’s more along the lines of Direct Project as opposed to NHIN. Although, I imagine that it could send the documents to some larger health information exchange if someone wanted to do so.

The larger application I see of this technology is as a replacement for the fax machine. In some ways, it’s like a second generation fax machine. The major differentiation I see between a document sent using the CDA “Unstructured Document” HL7 standard and a fax is all the meta data that comes with the CDA document.

The fax or scanning workflow for most EHR software consists of receiving faxed documents or scanning documents into what amounts to basically a bucket of all the scanned documents. Then, it’s up to the user to go in and sort through all the various faxes that have been received or documents that have been scanned. At this point, the user can assign the document to a patient in the EHR. You can imagine the challenges that this can pose. I wonder how many documents scanned or faxed into an EHR have been assigned to the wrong patient accidentally.

That’s what makes this new Fujitsu scanner quite interesting. If it’s receiving the document from an outside source, it will come with the meta information for the document as part of the CDA standard. That can then be leveraged to more quickly assign that document to the patient. Not to mention, then all of that CDA information is available for other uses within the EHR.

For inside documents that are scanned in through the Fujitsu device you can actually assign the document to a patient on the scanner itself. That’s right, you can identify which patient a scanned document belongs to while you’re holding the document in your hand. A much better way to ensure that the document you scanned gets attached to the right patient in your EHR.

I’m just touching on a few of the features of what’s possible with this new Smart Scanner from Fujitsu and smart documents. You can do other things on the scanner like dividing document scans between multiple patients.

Meaningful Use Monday Angle
Of course, as most of you know, on Monday we usually do our regular Meaningful Use Monday series. Turns out that the CDA Clinical Document standard that I discuss above is being adopted by ONC as part of meaningful use. I’ll be interested to see how this plays out over time, but don’t be surprised if EHR software has to support this standard in the future.

What I find more intriguing is that the above scanner could be used by someone who doesn’t have an EHR, but wants to exchange patient information. I still think that the long term solution to interoperability of patient information has got to come from connections with EHR software. However, this does illustrate that technology solutions can and will be created to exchange health information. In fact, some combination of these solutions could be a way to meet some of the meaningful use requirements around exchange of health information. You still can’t get the EHR stimulus money without an EHR, but technologies like this could help you achieve meaningful use.

I’ll keep an eye on how this technology progresses. I wonder how many EHR vendors will integrate with this type of technology. Whether we like it or not, documents are going to be a major part of healthcare for the foreseeable future. We’ll see if smart documents and smart scanners are an intermediate step to the health information exchange nirvana (whatever that might be).

I must admit that I’m not much of a book guy. Especially since there’s so much free information available on the internet about just about any subject you could want. However, I’ve been quite intrigued by the number of healthcare IT related books that I’ve seen coming out of late. Here’s a quick roundup of some of the ones I’ve seen.

Getting to Meaningful Use and Beyond: A Guide for IT Staff in Health Care by Fred Trotter and David Uhlman – I’ve been a big fan of Fred Trotter for a while. So, I’m glad he’s working on this book. Turns out the book isn’t even published, but in Fred Trotter open source style fashion, the book is available for free online right now. Of course, they’re hoping you’ll provide feedback.

The HITECH Act Made Easy: A Simple Guide to the Federal EHR Incentive Programs – I had this book sent to me. It’s a short book which I think is good. It tries to tackle not only the details of the Medicaid and Medicare stimulus program, but also has a number of sections on EHR selection and implementation as well. I love it’s question format where many of the chapters are a question and the chapter offers the answer.

Health Information Exchange Formation Guide: The Authoritative Guide for Planning and Forming an HIE in Your State, Region or Community – I haven’t really had a chance to dig into this book yet. It’s brought to you by HIMSS. It’s a pretty thick book which I think describes well the challenge that is forming an HIE. Without reading the book, I’m a little torn just by the subtitle of the book, “The Authoritative Guide for Planning and Forming an HIE in your State, Region or Community.” I guess it’s hard for me to imagine it being the “authoritative guide” when I think we’re still trying to figure out the right HIE business model. I don’t think we’ve found it yet. I guess I should read the book to find out.

Jim Tate’s EHR Incentive Roadmap – Ok, this is an e-Book, but I think it’s as good a value as any hard cover book. So, it’s worth mentioning. I wrote a whole post on Jim Tate’s EHR Incentive book before.

Any other books about EMR, Meaningful Use, and/or healthcare IT that are out that we should know about?

UPDATE: User EHR and Meaningful Use Recommendations from the comments below:
Electronic Health Records For Dummies – Recommended by Nate Osit

Electronic Health Records: Transforming Your Medical Practice, second edition – “This is a book from MGMA and was recommended to me by a coordinator from the REC (Ohio) that I have been shadowing.” – Mary Ellen Weber

Healthcare and health IT are plagued by conundrums. Providers long have been the ones asked to make hefty investments in EMRs and other IT systems to help remove costs from the healthcare system, but payers and plan sponsors tend to enjoy most of the financial benefits. Clinicians wish their organizations would share data with others, but those in the executive suite have been reluctant to cooperate with competitors for fear of losing revenue. And, let’s face it, medical errors can be profitable if a routine procedure turns into an expensive inpatient admission.

Portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are intended to address these problems by providing financial incentives for “meaningful use” of EMRs (including health information exchange) and by encouraging the creation of Accountable Care Organizations

I’m just back from the Institute for Health Technology Transformation health IT summit in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where I moderated panels on how health IT underpins ACOs and how business intelligence can create a framework for health information exchange.

The panelists did great job of articulating some of these conundrums and strategies to overcome them, but none better than Kevin Maher, director of clinical innovations for Horizon Healthcare Innovations, a new affiliate of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey tasked with testing new care models, and Victor Freeman, M.D., quality director in the Health Resources and Services Administration‘s Office of Health IT and Quality.

The patient-centered medical home is a great idea for managing care, promoting prevention and, ultimately reducing costs. “We view the base of the ACO as the patient-centered medical home,” Maher said. But what exactly does an ACO look like? “An ACO is like a unicorn,” Maher said. “We can all describe it, but we’ve never seen one.”

He noted that Horizon has started paying some physicians a care coordination fee to manage populations that potentially could add $60,000 or more to a doctor’s annual income. But there are plenty of factors outside a physicians’ control.

“Potentially the No. 1 focal point of a patient-centered medical home or an ACO is patient behavior,” Maher said. A doctor can’t force a patient to exercise more, quit smoking or get a mammogram or PSA test. There’s pay-for-performance for doctors, but what about paying for patient performance?

In January 2012, Horizon will launch a pilot to offer incentives to members who get recommended tests and choose providers that meet the health plan’s quality standards. That’s right, the Blues plan in New Jersey will pay people to go to the doctor and to make informed choices about which doctors they see. (“Everyone says she’s a great doctor” won’t cut it as an informed choice anymore.)

Freeman called the Horizon experiment “P4P that makes sense.”

Let’s just hope the technology can support making the right choices. “People in government get more involved in quality measurement, not necessarily quality,” Freeman said. Incentive programs these days still tend to be more pay-for-reporting than pay-for-quality, and the technology hasn’t fully matured in that area.

“EMRs were designed for billing, not quality reporting,” noted Freeman, who has a background in public and population health. Information often isn’t stored in discrete form, such as with images generated by specialists flagged as being abnormal, so even with HIE, it’s hard for primary care physicians to identify patients who might be candidates for early interventions before they actually exhibit symptoms of a disease.

“My biggest interest in HIE is how clinicians communicate with each other,” Freeman said.

But is the technology ready to help them do so? “HIE now reminds me of what EMRs were five years ago,” said another panelist, Bruce Metz, Ph.D., newly hired senior VP and CIO at the Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts. It’s viewed as an IT project that’s not necessarily linked to a business or clinical strategy. “You can’t force the technology to mature that fast,” he added.

And so the ride continues on what Metz called “a fast-moving train.” Have we even had time to see if the right people are on board?

I live in Chicago, a highly competitive healthcare market with some world-class medical schools (Northwestern, University of Chicago, Loyola, Rush) and a pretty decent record of EMR adoption. At least four major institutions/health systems run similar Epic EMRs: University of Chicago Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Rush University Medical Center and, in the northern suburbs, NorthShore University HealthSystem (formerly Evanston-Northwestern Healthcare).

Three NorthShore hospitals–Evanston Hospital, Glenbrook Hospital and Highland Park Hospital–were among the first in the country to reach Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model.(NorthShore’s Skokie Hospital since has reached Stage 7). Several others, notably Rush, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in northwest suburban Park Ridge, Mercy Hospital & Medical Center and  Swedish Covenant Hospital, have gotten to Stage 6.

But there’s been very little effort to interconnect these institutions and affiliated physician practices. Even during the RHIO heyday of 2004-07, I don’t recall much interoperability talk in the Chicago area. (In fact, one family physician, Dr. Stasia Kahn, in far west suburban St. Charles, got so frustrated that she formed her own group to promote EMR adoption and health information exchange, Northern Illinois Physicians for Connectivity. I had heard talk for a while of some south suburban hospitals joining in an HIE with counterparts across the state line in Northwest Indiana since Illinois was moving too slowly.)

All of that non-action at the state and regional levels happened under the not-so-watchful eye of one Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who apparently was more preoccupied with his own vanity and “giving healthcare to kids” (while also allegedly trying to blackmail the CEO of Children’s Memorial Hospital into donating to his campaign fund and also slowing Medicaid payments to pay for his All Kids program) than in, you know, actually improving healthcare for everyone by promoting HIE.

In February 2009, shortly after Blagojevich was removed from office and a couple weeks before the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law, new Gov. Pat Quinn signed a law allocating $3 million to the state’s Department of Healthcare and Family Services for HIE planning. That laid the groundwork for this week’s widely publicized announcement that the not-for-profit Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council had chosen technology from Microsoft, Computer Sciences Corp. and HealthUnity to build what could be the largest big-city HIE in the country, potentially serving 9.4 million people in nine Illinois counties and small parts of Indiana and Wisconsin.

I bring all of this up because I met yesterday with executives from the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council, a 76-year-old coalition of healthcare organizations in and around the city. It just so happened that the 2011 Microsoft Connected Health Conference was in town this week, so it was the perfect time and location for Microsoft to drop the news. According to MCHC Vice President Mary Ann Kelly, more than 70 percent of the council’s 150-some members have made a commitment to participate, and they seem to have a plan to make the HIE effort sustainable.

The exchange will operate on a subscription model, with the vendors taking on some of the risk, Kelly said. “The subscription fee will be based on the benefit each member derives,” Kelly explained.

Initially, the exchange will involve 22 hospitals in nine organizations, said Teresa Jacobsen, the council’s HIE director. “We want to get one or two use cases running first,” she said. They will start by linking emergency departments to exchange clinical summaries and for syndromic surveillance, according to Jacobsen. Once that’s going, the HIE plans on adding medication and allergy lists, diagnostic testing results and Continuity of Care Document reports, as well as additional elements for public health, including immunization records.

It all sounds great, and it’s a good idea for them to start slowly, but I wonder when and if smaller physician practices will get involved. My own physician has had an EMR for a while, but not every doctor in the practice uses it. (The four-physician practice recently upgraded to the Meaningful Use Edition of Sage Intergy and has started the 90-day clock for qualifying for Stage 1 Medicare incentives this year, but there’s essentially zero interoperability with other healthcare entities, unless you consider faxing records to others straight from a computer interoperability. I sure don’t.)

My guess is that scenarios like this are playing out all over the country. I wish them luck, but I’m not counting on nationwide interoperability for many years. For one thing, the federally funded, state-chartered Illinois HIE Authority held its very first organizational meeting Wednesday afternoon. “That’s the biggest wild card we don’t know,” MCHC CFO Dan Yunker said.

It’s key to getting payers—particularly Illinois Medicaid—on board with HIE and linking metropolitan exchange networks across the state and beyond. “Our hospitals in Chicago are responsible for the snowbirds who are in Naples (Florida),” Yunker noted. They’re also responsible for patients who come from places like Rockford, Springfield, Champaign, Carbondale and the Quad Cities for certain specialized services only available in the big city.

Yeah, this interoperability thing isn’t so easy.