What Would ONC’s Dr. Doug Fridsma Do? (THIS Geek Girl’s Guide to HIMSS)

I know you’ve all been wondering how I’m planning to spend my mad crazy week at HIMSS in New Orleans. Well, maybe not ALL of you, but perhaps at least one – who is most likely my blog boss, the master John Lynn. Given the array of exciting developments in healthcare IT across the spectrum, from mobile and telehealth to wearable vital sign monitoring devices, EMR consolidation to cloud-based analytics platforms, it’s been extraordinarily difficult to keep myself from acting like Dori in “Finding Nemo”: “Oooooh! Shiny!” I’ve had to remind myself daily that I will have an opportunity to play with everything that catches my eye, but that I am only qualified to write and speak intelligently on my particular areas of expertise. And so, I’m proud to say I’ve finally solidified my agenda for the entire week, and I cannot WAIT to go ubergeek fan girl on so many industry luminaries and fascinating up-and-comers making great strides towards interoperability, deriving the “meaning” in “Meaningful Use” from clinical data, and leveraging the power of big data analytics to improve quality of patient experience and outcomes.

On Sunday, I’m setting the stage for the rest of the week with a sit-down with ONC’s Director of Standards and Interoperability and Acting Chief Scientist, Dr. Doug Fridsma. His groundbreaking work in interoperability spans multiple initiatives, including: the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) and the CONNECT project, as well as the Federal Health Architecture. For insight into his passion for transforming the healthcare system through health IT, check out his blog: From The Desk of the Chief Science Officer.

Through the rest of the week, I aspire to see the world through Dr. Fridsma’s eyes, focusing on how each of the organizations and individuals contribute to the standards-based processes and policies that form the foundation for actionable analytics – and improved health. I’ve selected interviews with key visionaries from companies large and small, who I feel are representative of positive forward movement:

Health Care DataWorks piques my interest as an up-and-comer to watch, empowering healthcare systems to improve outcomes and reduce medical costs by providing accelerated EDW design and implementation, whether on-premise or via SaaS solution. Embedded industry analytics models supporting alternative network models, population-based payment models, and value-based purchasing allow for rapid realization of positive ROI.

Emdeon, is the single largest clinical, financial, and administrative network, connecting over 400,000 providers and executing more than seven billion health exchanges annually. And if that’s not enough to attract keen attention, they recently announced a partnership with Atigeo to provide intelligent analytics solutions with Emdeon’s PETABYTES of data.

Serving an area near and dear to my heart, Clinovations provides healthcare management consulting services to stakeholders at each link in the chain, from providers to payers and supporting trading partners – in areas from EMR implementation (and requisite clinical data standards) to market and vendor assessments, and data management activities throughout. With the dearth in qualified SME resources in the clinical data field, I look forward to learning about how Clinovations plans to manage their growth and retain key talent.

Who doesn’t love a great legacy decommissioning story? Mediquant proports adopting their DataArk product can result in an 80% reduction in legacy system costs through increased interoperability across disparate source systems and consolidated access. The “active archiving” solution allows for a centralized repository and consolidated accounting functions out of legacy data without continuing to operate (and support) the legacy system. Longitudinal clinical records? Yes, please!

Those are just a few on my must-see list, and I think Dr. Doug Fridsma would be proud of their vision, and find alignment to his ONC program goals. But will he be proud of their execution?

Can’t wait to find out, on the exhibit hall floor – and in the hallway conversations, and the client case study sessions, and the general scuttlebutt – at HIMSS!

About the author

Mandi Bishop

Mandi Bishop is a hardcore health data geek with a Master's in English and a passion for big data analytics, which she brings to her role as Dell Health’s Analytics Solutions Lead. She fell in love with her PCjr at 9 when she learned to program in BASIC. Individual accountability zealot, patient engagement advocate, innovation lover and ceaseless dreamer. Relentless in pursuit of answers to the question: "How do we GET there from here?" More byte-sized commentary on Twitter: @MandiBPro.

   

Categories