Spring 2016Interoperability Showcase Spotlights Health Information Sharing at HIMSS16
by Trish McDonald
Live demonstrations show impact on patient care
More than 42,000 health IT professionals attended the annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition, which featured the popular Interoperability Showcase. The Interoperability Showcase brings together vendors from health interoperability and standards ecosystems, to demonstrate how they can work together to engage patients, facilitate seamless health information exchange, meet meaningful use and ultimately improve continuity of care and health outcomes. Not one to be missed, HIMSS SoCal members took the opportunity to volunteer in the Showcase and got a front row seat to the action.
Attendees of the Interoperability Showcase walked through live and interactive demos of various IT systems in clinical settings, sharing important health information in real-time. There were 14 staged vignettes, ranging from childbirth to cancer discovery to chronic disease management and health and wellness. Each with 3-5 different vendors demonstrating how IHE standards-based interoperability facilitates the exchange of health information, improves workflow and increases efficiencies across the entire continuum of patient care.
More than 50 interoperability and standards vendors were represented, including juggernauts Cerner, Epic, McKesson, GE and Philips, amongst many others. Many of the participating vendors took the opportunity use the Interoperability Showcase as a stage to announce new innovations in support of population health initiatives.
For example, Caradigm, an enterprise population health provider, announced it supports more interoperability solutions and standards than any other healthcare platform with Open Exchange. Signet Accel, a software and services company, launched a new commercial federated data integration platform called Avec. Avec enables physicians and researchers to view, analyze and experiment with aggregated data from any number of disparate sources. And, Spok showcased its latest evolution of its integrated healthcare communication, workflow and collaboration suite called Spok Care Connect.
In addition to the real-world use cases, the Interoperability Showcase also featured over 30 educational sessions and spotlight kiosks for Telehealth, Testing and Certification, HL7 FHIR Innovations and Healthcare APIs. There was also a Federal Health Architecture spotlight on how state and federal agencies are sharing registries and EHR data to drive more patient access, while also contributing to population health management.
To learn more about this year’s use cases and participating vendors, and to see when you can check out the next Interoperabilty Showcase, please visit: http://www.interoperabilityshowcase.org/HIMSS16/index.aspx.