Health Information Exchange (HIE)

Some 1,200 health IT professionals packed into the Washington Hilton this week for the 2015 ONC Annual Meeting. The focus this year? Interoperability, standards and big data.

Technology challenges carry some blame for the sorry state of health data exchange in the U.S., but it's also a matter of simple dollars and cents.

Revisit what some hospital CIOs identified as their key challenges last year. From standardization of workflow processes to increasing compliance demands to concerns about privacy and security, CIOs had a full plate in 2014.

Reggio Emilia Hospital was faced with a challenge. Although the 900-bed acute care hospital has a picture archiving and communication system, electronic health record and computerized physician order entry, it needed a final element: an integrated clinical image repository and distribution system.

A physicians network in the Mid-Atlantic has been awarded the highest level of electronic medical record adoption, joining the only 6 percent of all ambulatory clinics that have achieved this status.

The Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative is a new national trade organization of HIEs, banding together to gain economies of scale, drive financial sustainability and raise awareness among healthcare organizations and legislators.

Montefiore Medical Center delivers care to some 2 million people in the Bronx and beyond, and has been a longtime leader in population health initiatives. But one of the "basic challenges that we face," says Jack Wolf, Montefiore's chief information officer, "is the lack of a unique patient identifier."

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT on Monday announced the release of its Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, 2015-2020, updating the goals of an initiative most recently published in 2011, when the U.S. healthcare landscape looked much different than it does today.

Health Level Seven International has launched the Argonaut Project -- a collaborative comprising healthcare heavy-hitters such as Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain, Beth Israel Deaconess and Partners HealthCare -- to speed the development and adoption of HL7’s standards framework, FHIR.

"I'd like to see a world where you get paid because you have good informaticians," said Doug Fridsma, MD, former chief scientist at ONC and now CEO of AMIA, speaking Wednesday at RSNA's 100th annual meeting in Chicago.