Tag: Rhapsody

Rhapsody and Corepoint Merge To Advance Interoperability

Rhapsody announces that the company will merge with Corepoint Health, the supplier of the Best in KLAS healthcare integration platform. The transaction will bring together two companies at the forefront of interoperability and create a dynamic combination of technology, talent, services, and trusted customer relationships to address the most complex healthcare interoperability challenges.

Both companies will continue to support and advance their respective solutions, while the combined entity will also devote its expanded resources to addressing the growing need for interoperability among regional, national and international healthcare providers and vendors.

“Corepoint’s platform offers incredibly fast, turn-key operations for provider organizations, HIEs and OEM partners, all with industry leading customer satisfaction. Complementing this with Rhapsody’s fully customizable and multi-platform capabilities creates great synergies for our current and future customers,” said Erkan Akyuz, president and CEO, Rhapsody. “Both entities share great technical depth and breadth and both have maintained long-standing customer relationships, which together yields a broader foundation on which to build the future of interoperability in healthcare.  Together, we can better support our customers to fulfill all of their changing and future needs.”

Available on premises and as a cloud-based service, the Rhapsody and Corepoint interoperability platforms offer comprehensive routing and transformation functionality for every operating environment, offering highly differentiated features, applications and end customer focuses.

The two platforms also support commonly used messaging standards and protocols such as FHIR, HL7 V2, CCD/C-CDA and DICOM.  These integration engines are among the most secure technology platforms in the healthcare industry, with customer bases that include the entire healthcare ecosystem and across the globe, including provider organizations, technology vendors, HIEs and public health systems.

“We are entering a new era in healthcare where the emphasis will be on expanding ecosystems and establishing new data trading partner relationships to optimize clinical and operational workflows. These initiatives will be powered by interoperability and data management: healthcare organizations that can excel in these areas will have a significant competitive advantage,” said Sean Cassidy, CEO of Corepoint Health. “The combination of Rhapsody and Corepoint enables our customers to continue to get tremendous value out of the products and services they love, while having the confidence that their interoperability partner is heavily invested in helping them confront the challenges they will face in the future.”

“We move decisively when perfect opportunities present themselves,” said Philippe Houssiau, operating partner at Hg. “The opportunity to bring Corepoint and Rhapsody together was incredibly compelling. Our investments in these two phenomenal companies demonstrate how excited we are about the future of interoperability. Rhapsody is off to an amazing start as an independent company: joining forces with Corepoint will enable the combined team to accelerate the delivery of FHIR-based services, cloud-based integration solutions and support for regional and national interoperability frameworks.”

Learn more here.

What the Hell Is Going On with Healthcare Interoperability?

Road Closed, Construction, Detour, RoadThe Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) filed its annual year-end report to Congress at the start of 2019. The 22-page report summarized nationwide trends in health information exchange in 2018, including the adoption of EHRs and other technologies that support electronic access to patient information. The most interesting takeaway has to do with the ever-elusive healthcare interoperability.

According to the report, HHS said it heard from stakeholders about several barriers to interoperable access to health information remain, including technical, financial, trust and business practice barriers. “These barriers impede the movement of health information to where it is needed across the care continuum,” the report said. “In addition, burden arising from quality reporting, documentation, administrative, and billing requirements that prescribe how health IT systems are designed also hamper the innovative usability of health IT.”

To better understand these barriers, HHS said it conducted multiple outreach efforts to engage the clinical community and health IT stakeholders to better understand these barriers. Based on these takeaways, HHS said it plans to support, through its policies, and that the health IT community as a whole can take to accelerate progress: Focus on improving interoperability and upgrading technical capabilities of health IT, so patients can securely access, aggregate, and move their health information using their smartphones (or other devices) and healthcare providers can easily send, receive, and analyze patient data; increase transparency in data sharing practices and strengthen technical capabilities of health IT so payers can access population-level clinical data to promote economic transparency and operational efficiency to lower the cost of care and administrative costs; and prioritize improving health IT and reducing documentation burden, time inefficiencies, and hassle for health care providers, so they can focus on their patients rather than their computers.

Additionally, HHS said it plans to leverage the 21st Century Cures Act to enhance innovation and promote access and use of electronic health information. The Cures Act includes provisions that can: promote the development and use of upgraded health IT capabilities; establish transparent expectations for data sharing, including through open application programming interfaces (APIs); and improve the health IT end user experience, including by reducing administrative burden.

“Patients, healthcare providers, and payers with appropriate access to health information can use modern computing solutions (e.g., machine learning and artificial intelligence) to benefit from the data,” HHS said in its report. “Improved interoperability can strengthen market competition, result in greater quality, safety and value for patients, payers, and the healthcare system generally, and enable patients, healthcare providers, and payers to experience the promised benefits of health IT.”

Interoperability barriers include:

Elsewhere, the Center for Medical Interoperability, located in Nashville, Tenn., is an organization that is working to promote plug-and-play interoperability. The center’s members include LifePoint Hospitals, Northwestern Memorial Healthcare, Hospital Corporation of America, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Hennepin Healthcare System, Ascension Health, Community Health Systems, Scripps Health, and UNC Health Care System.

Its mission is “to achieve plug-and-play interoperability by unifying healthcare organizations to compel change, building a lab to solve shared technical challenges, and pioneering innovative research and development.” The center stressed that the “lack of plug-and-play interoperability can compromise patient safety, impact care quality and outcomes, contribute to clinician fatigue and waste billions of dollars a year.”

More interoperability barriers identified

In a separate study, “Variation in Interoperability Among U.S. Non-federal Acute Care Hospitals in 2017,” showed additional difficulty integrating information into the EHR was the most common reason reported by hospitals for not using health information received electronically from sources outside their health system. Lack of timely information, unusable formats and difficulty finding specific, relevant information also made the list, according to the 2017 American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey, Information Technology Supplement.

Among the explanations health systems provided for rarely or never using patient health information received electronically from providers or sources outside their health system:

Hospitals, when asked to explain their primary inability to send information though an electronic exchange, pointed to: Difficulty locating providers’ addresses. The combined reasons, ranked in order regardless of hospital classification (small, rural, CAH or national) include:

Additional Barriers

The report also details other barriers related to exchanging patient health information, citing the 2017 AHA survey:

“Policies aimed at addressing these barriers will be particularly important for improving interoperable exchange in health care,” the report concluded. “The 2015 Edition of the health IT certification criteria includes updated technical requirements that allow for innovation to occur around application programming interfaces (APIs) and interoperability-focused standards such that data are accessible and can be more easily exchanged. The 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 further builds upon this work to improve data sharing by calling for the development of open APIs and a Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement. These efforts, along with many others, should further improvements in interoperability.”

What healthcare leaders are saying about interoperability

While HHS said it conducted outreach efforts to engage health IT stakeholders to better understand these barriers, we did too. To further understand what’s currently going on with healthcare interoperability, read the following perspectives from some of the industry’s leaders. If there’s something more that you think must be done to improve healthcare interoperability, let us know:

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