The 2019 HIMSS Annual Conference may be over, but that doesn’t mean an end to the pressing challenges and trends discussed at Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center. More than 42,500 people attended the conference — the majority of whom were C-suite executives and HIT professionals taking full advantage of the healthcare IT industry’s largest opportunity for networking, product promotions, continuing education and major announcements.
As always, there were a few subjects during HIMSS19 that generated significant buzz. Here are four of those trends that will remain key topics throughout the next year:
Healthcare data exchange
The release of two long-anticipated proposed rules on information blocking came just as HIMSS19 convened. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) unveiled proposals that would require healthcare providers and plans to implement open data sharing technologies to support transitions of care. The first focuses on standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) and carries forward provisions from the 21st Century Cures Act.
Those associated with Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicare Advantage and Qualified Health Plans in the federally-facilitated exchanges would have to provide patients with immediate electronic access to medical claims and other health information by 2020. Under a latter proposal, health information exchanges (HIEs), health IT developers and health information networks (HINs) can be penalized up to $1 million per information blocking violation, but providers are not subject to fines.
The goal of the proposals is to consider care across the entire continuum, giving patients greater control and understanding of their health journeys. This is interesting, given that HIMSS attendees who responded to Stoltenberg Consulting’s seventh annual HIT Industry Outlook Survey noted “lack of system interoperability” as one of their biggest operational burdens, and “leveraging meaningful patient data” as the IT team’s most significant hurdle this year. Thus, overcoming these challenges to meet the newly proposed mandates will likely dominate discussions during the remainder of 2019.
Joanna Gorovoy, senior director product and solutions marketing, Axway.
Joanna Gorovoy
To accelerate the shift toward value-based care – organizations across the healthcare ecosystem must find new ways to unlock value from an ever-expanding array of data sources to create data-rich digital services and experiences that improve patient engagement, enable delivery of more personalized healthcare services, and increase clinical collaboration and care coordination across the patient journey. Developers play a key role in accelerating innovation that will shape the future of healthcare and positively impact patient outcomes. But innovating at the speed of digital is challenging in an industry that has long been plagued by interoperability challenges, a prevalence of legacy, siloed systems and applications, and heightened data privacy and security requirements which hinder digital projects. As a result, there are a few key things developers should keep in mind when designing for today’s healthcare market.
You can’t spell interoperability without A-P-I
The frustrations associated with sharing information have burdened the healthcare industry’s digitization efforts for many years. With application programming interfaces (APIs) taking hold, however, data exchange is now easier to accomplish. APIs are revolutionizing data sharing by making it possible to bridge legacy IT systems of record, such as electronic heath records (EHRs), with modern systems of digital engagement, such as mobile apps. Healthcare developers must take an API-first approach and will need to gain knowledge of the latest healthcare interoperability standards – such as FHIR. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is an HL7 standard that simplifies the exchange of healthcare information and promotes the use of APIs to support light-weight integration, facilitating secure data access and interoperability. As healthcare developers increasingly leverage APIs to move beyond some of the challenges associated with secure data sharing and opening up proprietary EHR systems, this will result in faster time to market for innovative digital services and experiences.
Create a sound security strategy
Security must always be top of mind for healthcare developers. Before writing a single line of code, healthcare developers should familiarize themselves with HIPAA regulations that protect all personal health data transactions and impose hefty penalties for violations. As developers design apps that leverage patient health data from a variety of sources, they need to take the time to understand how this law works and must be mindful of how to mitigate security concerns. Adopting a full lifecycle API management solution enables developers to secure and manage FHIR and other healthcare APIs in a unified way across projects and communities, ensure data security and streamline compliance and help reduce the data security burden by using built in, configurable audit trails and reporting.
Inviting external innovation
Healthcare organizations are increasingly looking to invite open innovation into their organizations as they struggle to keep pace with digital transformation. Organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, Johnson and Johnson and Stanford, for example, have hosted developer challenges and hackathons to stimulate innovation and bring in fresh perspectives from developers outside of their organization/industry to help tackle big problems such as healthcare access and affordability. As the industry struggles with IT modernization challenges, developers who have experience working across multiple industries can provide a fresh point of view and can contribute skills and approaches they have gained developing applications for other industries/use cases to provide value to healthcare.
