On Day 4 of our 12 Days of Christmas Posts we bring you a special guest post, “Four Calling Birds” Highlight Four Use Cases for Future HIE Success
By Buff Colchagoff, CEO, RosettaHealth
Twitter: @rosettahealth
Twitter: @BuffColchagoff
Did you know that there has been a long-term debate about whether or not it’s “four calling birds” or “four colly birds” in the classic Twelve Days of Christmas? I only recently discovered this in doing research for my annual “12 Days of Christmas” column for our friends at Answers Media Network.
While this may be controversial, I am going to side on the “calling birds” team, because we have four unique use cases – calling from the future – that will enable long-term success for HIEs, and other organizations in the Health IT domain. Did you get the wordplay there?
Now more than ever, HIEs need to be future-focused and demonstrate tangible value to their customers, whether it’s hospitals, payers, individual practices or state agencies. The stakes are rising in exchanging data, and the challengers more numerous: from national networks commoditizing CCD exchange to EHRs offering basic query-retrieve features. –- how do you distinguish your value?
I recently had the pleasure of doing a RosettaHealth podcast interview with Phil Beckett, CEO of HASA, who discussed these use cases, which will help HIEs climb in value, overcome challengers and pave the way for future success:
- Calling Bird Use Case #1 – Alerting: Provide just-in-time data to clinicians when they need it, and how they need it. Counter ‘alert fatigue’ by providing notifications that are targeted, specific and actionable for care providers.
- Calling Bird Use Case #2 – Social Determinants of Health (SDOH): With environmental and social factors accounting for a large portion of a patients overall health, social determinants can make a big difference. Adding this data to clinical data services can increase your perceived value to customers — and have tangible effects on outcomes.
- Calling Bird Use #3 – Combining Claims and Clinical Data: Bringing these two worlds together provides a more complete picture and fills in potential gaps. By providing a more comprehensive data model, your value as a data source increases, and customers gain deeper insights into individual and overall population health.
- Calling Bird Use Case #4 – Targeted Data Exchange: Good news: Data is flowing. Bad news: Clinicians are tired of getting huge dumps of data. Provide targeted data with summaries that matter to a provider’s specialization rather than just huge longitudinal records. Or, even better, provide an easy way for them see both and choose.
The right vendor partnerships can certainly help HIEs to better leverage the resources and knowledge that brings data to life, and exchange data in ways that enhance the overall quality of care – as highlighted in these use cases.
“The health information exchange future is always dynamic and you can’t stand still, you always have to deliver value,” said Beckett in the podcast. “To stay viable and relevant, you need to be community centric and leverage partnerships with national networks and vendors. Thinking globally and acting locally is the winning solution.”
As Phil mentioned, HIEs need to continually innovate and be future focused. We hope that all HIEs hear the calling from these “four calling bird uses” cases in 2020. Happy holidays!