On September 4th, 2014, Mario Hyland, Senior Vice President and Founder of AEGIS.net, Inc., attended the 2020 Roadmap Executive Summit hosted by eHealth Initiative. The eHealth Initiative 2020 Roadmap is a collaboration of leading healthcare associations, organizations, and federal agencies creating a shared vision of the strategies, policies, and actions that are required to fully transform our healthcare system by the year 2020.
The event brought together other leaders from key stakeholder groups, including provider, pharma, vendor, clinician, lab, and consumers, to discuss the future state of healthcare and the innovation needed to navigate the road to a healthcare delivery transformation plan. The event focused on the areas of interoperability, business and clinical motivators, and data access and use privacy. Mario brought his passion for “better healthcare through better testing” to the series of executive roundtables and open forums.
At the 2020 Roadmap Executive Summit, National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo stated that: “Interoperability is the perfect example of where we’re not going to only do this federally, and we have got to partner with the private sector.”
AEGIS was selected to participate in the follow up 2020 Vision: eHI’s Roadmap for Healthcare Transformation webinar to initiate multi-stakeholder dialogues to look ahead to the next five years and reexamine recent policy, innovation, and technology efforts. On September 16th, 2014, Mario provided more depth from the Interoperability Workgroup perspective on:
- Market Motivators and Incentive Programs
- Federal Policy Changes
- Priorities
- Direction & Action
Key takeaways from the webinar included:
- Need to motivate a public education campaign to encourage provider and patient buy-in to nationwide interoperability ecosystem
- Encourage market to standards and open architecture
- Encourage development of portfolio of HIE capabilities focused on specific use cases
- Facilitate more rapid maturation and alignment of Direct-based ecosystem
- Facilitate market-convening approach to motivate standards for query capability
- Promulgate standards and create publicly available test harness
- ONC and CMS need to define the essential elements of a nationwide interoperability system
- Focus on non-regulatory approaches to influence creation of a health information exchange ecosystem (purchasing, convening, other levers)
- Government needs to play a strong role in interoperability in almost all building block areas, however, the private sector needs to become more engaged to solve more of these problems on its own
- Nationwide interoperability should be defined in terms of which interoperability functions should be universally available
- Patient control of their data can help to sidestep some existing barriers to interoperability such as privacy and system integration issues
- Examine tactical approaches to resolving state variation in privacy laws
Over the next several months, the intent of this initiative is to:
- Identify Key Challenges to Solve
- Gather Feedback from the Field
- Propose Solutions
- Revise Recommendations
The Interoperability Workgroup with support from the eHI 2020 Roadmap participants will work with a wide array of leading associations, organizations, and key federal agencies with strategic recommendations being released in Fall 2014. This will include many activities such as surveys, events and roundtables from these participants and the general public.