Goodbye to 2011 - A Recap of the Year's Events - Part 1

As 2011 washes into history making way for 2012, I want to send my warmest and most sincere wishes for a Healthy, Happy and Most Blessed New Year in 2012 for all. 

I entered 2011 finishing up my duties as Interim CEO for CareSpark.  I have had the pleasure of working with CareSpark since 2005 first as a volunteer and then starting in 2009, I contracted to provide strategic and technical services in support of their implementation of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN), the SSA Sponsored Project as well as a limited CMS pilot with three HIE's. 

Unfortunately, CareSpark made the decision to close and announced it in July 2011.  I had really hoped that the community would be able to come together to move the services forward under the CareSpark umbrella.  I am still busy running my business, Serendipity Health, LLC, that has provided full time employment for me this year for which I am grateful.  It has been quite some time since I have posted, so I will start this first post of the year giving you a recap of some of the highlights that I experienced in 2011.  

In January 2011, I had the opportunity to volunteer my time as one of the IHE North American Connectathon monitors helping grade/evaluate vendor tests for various Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profiles. Over 4000 tests were completed by over 450 health IT system engineers.  These engineers represent over 100 HIT organizations who had the goal of testing interoperability and working to fine tune their implementations in over 150 products to meet the requirements of the various IHE International profiles. These same profiles make up components of the many NwHIN and Meaningful Use standards. This group picture is of all the monitors that worked together to pull off the grand task of grading the over 4000 tests over the one week event.

January in Chicago is not my favorite place to be, but I feel honored that I was asked to help and gladly volunteered my time to help the healthcare industry with this worthwhile effort. The event this year will be held January 9-14, 2012.  

In February 2011, I attended the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference along with some 30,000+ other attendees. The week started with me being one of the presenters at the Interoperability Workshop held early in the week.  My contribution to the agenda was to wrap up the workshop with the overview of US relevant standards including NwHIN and The Direct Project that are required for providers to implement Meaningful Use. The workshop sold out attendance and was very interactive for all attendees. I shared the presenter duties with Lee Jones, Keith Boone, and Bob Yencha.   

The week was full of activities and networking. Steve Leiber and David Blumenthal presented to a standing room only audience at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase.  The next several topics were all included in the Showcase which was the largest ever at nearly one acre in size.  It had all the typical areas represented as well as the area hosted by Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) showing approximately 40 demonstrations highlighting how health practitioners are securely exchanging health data between doctor's offices, hospitals, benefit providers, government agencies and with other health organizations, all across America.  I am happy to report that two stations within the ONC area, showcased some of my contracted endeavors from 2010 through 2011.  

The AmeriHealth Mercy and Independence Blue Cross station showcased the initiative created by both organizations that gives health care providers better access to health plan information and improves the quality of member care.  I am proud to have been involved in a small way with this innovative way of leveraging the standards by various stakeholders focusing on two use cases - sharing medication information and hospital admission through secure patient portals, provider portals, and HIEs.

The second station that I was involved with was one of eight pilots demonstrating the use of Direct Project specifications.  I have been involved with the Direct Project since it's launch in March 2010. This demonstration illustrated the feasibility of utilizing the Direct Project constructs to enable secure messaging between a federal agency (Veterans Affairs), and a regional health information exchange network (CareSpark). This demonstration showed the secure, standards-based transmission of a referral for mammography from a VA medical center to a private sector provider clinic, and the reply from the private sector provider clinic with a text based report. 

This CareSpark pilot demonstration  transitioned to the Health Information Partnership for Tennessee (HIP-TN) after the HIMSS conference and resulted in the delivery of live patient information in September 2011.  I feel very lucky to be managing the Direct Project strategy as well as the NwHIN Exchange onboarding and acting as the CTO contracted to HIP-TN both last year and now going into 2012.  I count my blessing each day and give thanks for the priviledge to help my own state and Keith Cox, CEO of HIP-TN with our go forward strategies to improve the healthcare quality while reducing the costs associated.  

Michael J. Fox was one of the keynote speakers and the DeLorean time machine used in the Back to the Future trilogy was on display on the showroom floor.  I had a good friend offer to take the picture of me in front of it. Yes, it is a bit silly, but I just had to when the offer was made.  Thanks Cliff...

One of the days there was a Tweetup of of us "technogeeks" in the HIT industry who showed to support the cause of outreach and education.  I finally got to meet up with some of the wonderful folks I have had the opportunity to work with over my 22 year career in HIT. 

I attended several events over the course of the week in Orlando at HIMSS, including the H.I.T. Men and Women Reception which toasts the art and inspired vision of today's most powerful healthcare IT leaders. I am honored to serve on the TN HIMSS Board with Michael Hollis who is the brainchild for this event. At HIMSS 2011, I was lucky enough to walk the red carpet with Michael and Antoine Aggasi both of which are working to advance interoperable healthcare. I am going to end this post update today since I have written quite a bit for your to digest and tomorrow morning will be here before i know it.  

I will give the update on the remainder of the year tomorrow so stay tuned for another post soon.  I have been asked by so many of my friends lately what I have been up to, so I share this with those who care. If you don't care, then you would not have read this far.  I promise to post more often this coming year and reconnect with many of you who I look forward to seeing and working with again in 2012.  Until next time.....

IHE Quality, Research & Public Health supplements published for Public Comment

Well it has been quite a bit of time since my last blog, so I apologize, but life has been busy at Serendipity Health for me. I am not complaining as business is good and I will blog more about some of the work I have been doing associated to HIT in other posts soon, I promise.   

As co-chair for the Quality, Research and Public Health (QRPH) domain for IHE International, I thought it was most important to bring your attention to some newly published supplements out for public comment.  Amit Popat and I are happy to co-chair the QRPH domain that has many, very talented and forward thinking individuals who are trying to solve some of the interoperability issues that are leading edge and necessary for the future of health care improvement.  

I encourage all who are involved with health information exchange and HIT to please review the supplements listed below and provide public comment to allow us to improve this documentation for future use. Please feel free to contact me to learn more about our domain and the work we are forging forward.  

IHE Community,

Quality, Research and Public Health supplements published for Public Comment

The IHE Quality, Research and Public Health Technical Committee has published the following supplements to the forthcoming IHE Quality, Research and Public Health Technical Framework for public comment in the period from June 17, 2011 to July 17, 2011:

·       Early Hearing Care Plan (EHCP) 

·       Mother and Child Health (MCH) 

·       Physician Reporting to a Public Health Repository-Cancer Registry (PRPH-Ca) 

·       Public Health Reporting (PH-rpt) 

·       Quality Measure Definition - Early Hearing (QMD-EH) 

·       Quality Measure Execution - Early Hearing (QME-EH) 

·       Retrieve Process for Execution (RPE)

The documents are available for download at http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/public_comment.cfm. Comments submitted by July 17, 2011, will be considered by the Quality, Research and Public Health Technical Committee in developing the trial implementation version of the supplements.  Comments should be submitted at http://www.ihe.net/qrph/qrphcomments.cfm.

Tennessee's Department of Economic & Community Development...Invest in Tennessee

The 57th Annual/2010 Governor's Conference will be held September 16 - 17, 2010 in Nashville, TN.   I won't be able to attend as I will be on vacation, but a variety of informative sessions will be delivered. As a proud Tennessean, I can say, Tennessee is good for business, offering a beneficial labor environment, productive and educated work force, wonderful quality of life and wealth of technology resources. These factors combine to create a business climate that gives companies a winning edge in their long-term growth and profitability.

Since my blog is centered on Healthcare IT, I wanted to tie together this conference with the Nashville Medical Trade Center.  I blogged about this new center back in April.  I understand that since the initial announcement in April, there has been significant activities.  I wanted to share this video that highlighted some of these activities.



I am so happy to see the continued success of the interactive interoperability showcase that I helped create in 2004 and launch internationally in Europe and Asia. I was blessed to meet and introduce our Governor to the showcase for the first time in 2005. It is wonderful to see this key feature for HIMSS now have a permanent and flexible home at the Nashville Medical Trade Center.  I look forward to seeing the vision and passion continue to grow while creating many wonderful opportunities for the citizens in our great state.  I hope that I as founder and President of Serendipity Health can continue collaborating with stakeholders across the state of Tennessee to find ways to deploy connected healthcare to help improve the quality of care for us all.