I’ve completed my workshop and education session presentations
so now I can relax a bit and focus on meeting with friends, colleagues, and
clients. I’m excited I had time this year to attend more education sessions. My
colleagues from Acmeware presented on topics that covered MEDITECH Data
Repository Reporting and reporting request lifecycle, BCA Dashboards, HIE
Integration, revenue cycle strategies, and quality cycle management.
Alex Sheen, the Founder of ‘because I said Iwould’ keynoted the Friday session. Alex has taken up a noble cause,
leaving his full-time software development job to start ‘because I said I would’,
an international social movement and nonprofit dedicated to the betterment of
humanity through promises made and kept. Alex’s movement has helped so many
people overcome challenges. When you hear him speak you can’t help but reflect
on your life and the finite time you have in your life with family and friends.
If you haven’t been to the website I would highly recommend it. There are so
many inspirational stories people have shared. https://becauseisaidiwould.com/category/shared-with-us
Hoda Sayed-Friel and Helen Waters from MEDITECH gave great
keynote presentations that kicked off with highlighting some recent trends and success
stories with their flagship MEDITECH Expanse platform. They showcased their
high-profile Expanse platform clients. They continue to emphasize MEDITECH’s attractive
total cost of ownership value proposition model compared to competitors. I love when Hoda speaks. she is always providing good
nuggets and insight into MEDITECH’s research and development efforts and
moonshot projects.
I was excited to hear Hoda announce a development API
sandbox available to hospitals and vendors to experiment with developing apps,
potentially inspiring creativity and innovation. App developers will have
sandbox development access to a plethora of clinical and billing information
including demographics, results, medications, and standard information though
FHIR based RESTful APIs interfaces using Argonaut standards. Standards are
great! This is a great strategic move in the right direction for 3rd party
app development and adoption.
Remember when I mentioned in my Dispatch from MUSE 2015 blog on MEDITECH as a platform (MaaP). Hoda mentioned back
then, they will be offering MEDITECH as a platform by allowing vendors to
develop and manage applications that are built on top of MEDITECH
infrastructure. Hospitals would be able to purchase from a list of vendor apps,
similar to the App Store, software to download and install directly into the
hospital MEDITECH system. Whether it’s MEDITECH as a Service (MaaS) or MEDITECH
as a Platform (MaaP), having a sandbox development environment is a strategic
move that is critical to MEDITECH adoption.
Developers will be empowered to create apps, test interfaces
and interoperability, driving efficiency and clinical workflow improvements.
Promoting innovation through cloud-based services that facilitate CEHRT,
quality reporting, care coordination, patient engagement, patient experience
and population health.
Sending data back into MEDITECH has always been a challenge.
This challenge has opened markets for other vendors over the past decades. Now the market dynamics could change. Hoda announced new FHIR inbound services for app
developers for filing data for scheduling and questionnaire's directly into the
MEDITECH data structures. MEDITECH Physician advisory services will have more
emphasis with app development and services assisting physicians to navigate the
new normal in healthcare payment reform.
Artificial Intelligence, virtual assistants, ambient sensing
technology, machine learning and deep learning will be on the horizon. MEDITECH
is seriously considering applied cases for AI and virtual assistants like Alexa
and Cortana where there could be potential market opportunities to partner with
companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google with virtual assistant technology.
For the finale, Hoda excited the crowd by mentioning a
moonshot technology developed at MIT that
allows a user to verbalize words internal but not speaking out loud. This
device can ‘hear’ the words you say in your head using subvocalization signal
detection by electrodes and turned into words using AI. Imagine a clinician documenting on a patient without opening their mouth or uttering a sound, NaturallyThinking! Honda mentioned the
buzz around blockchain but nothing in the near future. MEDITECH is waiting to
see the market direction with this type of technology before committing
resources.
Great stuff from Hoda and MEDITECH!
I attended a great tech session from Alex Walker, Vice
President of Product Development at Blue Elm on Identify, Anonymize, and
Encrypt Your Data Repository PHI Data. Alex presented on SQL Server and DR
encryption, hashing and security using new technology from SQL Server. Alexis
showed were to identify the data that MEDITECH that stores its own schema to
denote items it considers to be Protected Health Information (PHI). This
applies the metadata from the Data Repository in order to identify columns that
need to be protected. He reviewed various capabilities within SQL Server to
encrypt data at rest and evaluate the strengths and drawbacks of each. Alex provided a sample project using Visual Studio and
published the code to Git to test the code that is available to play with. Great
job Alex!
Theresa Jasset from Acmeware and Jodi Frei from Northwestern
Medical Center presented on electronic reporting and the steps critical to
defining a predictive reproducible pattern that is key to quality cycle
management. This pathway requires three critical steps: Electronically capture
the clinical documentation, Nomenclature Mapping and Validate performance
output for data completeness and accuracy. Theresa, Jodi and Alexis Donnaruma, Acmeware’s
Quality Program Manager, created a poster titled The Value in Validating eCQM Data
that ties nicely into their presentation and provides an illustration of quality
cycle management validation strategies. They picked a great topic that is so important to the future of healthcare as we transition to quality outcomes reporting.
Howard Minor from Acmeware presented on Report Request
Lifecycle. More and more hospitals are expanding their reporting capabilities
and overall reporting needs. As we transition from fee for service to value
bases care, organizations need to rethink their existing reporting models which
will require hundreds of new reports at organizations. Howard presented a model
for report cycle management and evaluating different phases of a typical report
request. He provided practical and repeatable models any organization could
start evaluating. Great presentation!
Jamie Gerardo from Acmeware presented on Health Information
Exchange. Jamie’s session included meaningful discussion among the attendance
and included references from MEDITECH and Larry O’Toole on some of the projects
in-progress and in R&D. MEDITECH has taken a noticeable role in promoting
interoperability and integration in healthcare.
It was great to see all my friends, colleagues and clients
at MUSE and looking forward to next year!
For those who want to say hello, I'm speaking at the
MEDITECH 2018 Nurse and HomeCare Forum in Foxborough, MA on Wednesday, June 13th from 1:00
pm to 2:00 pm.
Patti Yates from MEDITECH, Jodi Frei from Northwestern and I
will be presenting on Electronic Clinical Quality Reporting: Learn from the
Past; Understand the Present; Prepare for the Future (All platforms). Join us as we relate electronic Clinical Quality Measures
(eCQMs) to CMS program requirements, as well as describe the importance of
ongoing validation and performance monitoring in order to optimize clinical
outcomes and avoid financial penalties. Lessons learned, and audit preparation
will also be discussed.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
