HIMSS 2017 Takes Off

One of the most celebrated conferences in healthcare IT, HIMSS 2017, commenced on February 19th and more than 40,000 health IT professionals, vendors, and executives have gathered in Orlando to discuss the future possibilities healthcare holds. Day 1 brought with itself many insightful discussions varying from EHR safety, precision medicine and interoperability, to the need for increasing cybersecurity and medical identity theft. Here are some of the major takeaways from Day 1:

Existing disconnect between payors and providers on healthcare IT

A study at HIMSS revealed a misalignment of priorities between providers and payors in healthcare. Where 61 percent of healthcare vendors/consultants and 43 percent of providers are on the lookout for efficient staff, leveraging clinical IT, including privacy/security, care coordination, the culture of care and population health happens to be some major concerns for payors.

Innovaccer’s Speaker Session on Value-Based Reimbursement

Value-based reimbursement being the watchword in healthcare was a hot topic of discussion at the conference. Sandeep Gupta, Co-Founder and COO of Innovaccer, along with Mark Anderson, a renowned health IT futurist shared actionable insights on plotting a roadmap to VBR in a session titled, “7 stages of Value-based Reimbursement.” The talk indulged on a 7-Stage Infrastructure to succeed with value-based reimbursement:

• Data Integration
• Performance Dashboards
• Population Health Management
• Care Management
• Patient Engagement
• 2-way Interoperability
• 360 Patient Pulse

Hopes from the New Federal Administration

With President Trump’s administration taking charge, a lot of hopes are pinned to new health policies and government spending on healthcare. Some of the major areas of focus range from patient-generated data, challenges with the exchange of CCDA and ADT information, enhanced oversight and accountability for its certification program and new focuses on behavioral health and post-acute care. Favorably, the goal remains to be creating a value-based ecosystem and efforts continue on interoperability, measuring providers’ progress on sending, finding, receiving and integrating data from third parties and tracking how they’re using it to inform care decisions.

Fast Tracking Interoperability

Interoperability continues to be the one of the biggest challenges for the healthcare industry in transitioning to value-based care. The National Association for Trusted Exchange came up with Blue Button Directory at HIMSS 17, a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources(FHIR)-based system prototype designed to simplify secure data exchange among providers to improve outcomes. The goal has always been to make it easy for providers to use direct communication with patients in a way that fits with their existing workflow and business processes and was one of the much talked-about topics on the first day.

Concerns with Cybersecurity

In 2014, nearly 9 million patient health records were breached in 164 reported incidents. By March 2015, that number had increased tenfold. This alarming statistic calls for a successful implementation of cybersecurity with innovative, reliable health IT solutions for ensuring the success of value-based reimbursement models. Organizations and healthcare experts attending HIMSS emphasized on the need to put in more investments in appropriate health IT technology and secure transmissions that share valuable information in a secure and encrypted manner across multiple healthcare settings.

To put it in a nutshell, value-based reimbursement and providing affordable, quality care was on the frontlines on Day 1 of HIMSS 17. It’s essential that healthcare providers focus on delivering high-quality care and improve upon any patient satisfaction issue, and continue working towards creating a successful value-based ecosystem.

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Join us at HIMSS Conference 2017 at Booth 6179-31 in Population Care Management Center.