The HIMSS – NCA offers a free lunch and learn webinar program opportunity for its membership and stakeholders in the National Capital Area to complement its regular, third Thursday monthly meeting topics. This free lunchtime webinar serves as an opportunity for a deeper dive into the topic previously covered at the monthly meeting and is held two weeks following the regular monthly meeting. AEGIS was approached for our expertise in the interoperability arena to participate in the kick-off webinar series for the HIMSS-NCA Community. The topic that Mario Hyland from AEGIS participated in the recent forum that tackled Standards and Interoperability – Challenges, Initiatives, and Solutions. Mario focused on the challenges of implementing truly interoperable systems, suggested approaches, and identified successes in addition to the recently formed initiative, the Interoperability Working Group, within the Open Source Electronic Health Record Associations (OSEHRA). The webinar speakers participated from industry organizations and healthcare organizations who are working on interoperability initiatives and solutions as well as those whose stakeholders are struggling with health information exchanges that require interoperability.
AEGIS specifically addressed:
- What are the challenges associated with interoperability between disparate systems even within the four walls of a hospital, let alone externally with other adjacent community providers and external organizations?
- Participants and Systems Not Ready to Test
- Understanding the Requirements and Specifications
- Common Understanding of Interoperability with Actionable Results
- Adoption of Common Standards and Terminologies
- Meeting the Interoperability Challenge: HIE Requirements
- Common Definition of Interoperability (IEEE)
- Syntactic Interoperability
- Semantic Interoperability
- Continuous Interoperability
- Goals and Purpose of the OSEHRA IWG
- Aimed at promoting the importance of continuous interoperability and information exchange testing within the Health IT industry.
- Mobilize the community to participate in the building of Open Source interoperability solutions
- What’s on the horizon for interoperability?
- Where is interoperability making progress?
- Are the meaningful use targets in Stage 2 achievable given the lack of standards?
- Will other drivers like accountable care and patient care coordination push hospital providers to achieve health information exchange in spite of interoperability standards?
If you missed this exciting HIMSS-NCA webinar – you may access the Presentation Slides and the Recorded Webinar at this hyperlinks.