Research firm KLAS has established a new advisory team, containing contributors and EHR vendors as part of an initiative to approach health IT interoperability across the healthcare industry.
The advisory team, chaired by former Northwestern Memorial Hospital CIO Tim Zoph, will assist to oversee a nationwide KLAS survey targeted at measuring health information exchange and contributor satisfaction with vendor support in enabling interoperable networks. Finally, the aim is to publicly report real-world clinician experiences with vendor interoperability and to track industry growth in acquiring data exchange.
A measurement tool—passed by both contributors and vendors at a KLAS Keystone Summit arranged last fall in Midway, Utah—is the procedure by which KLAS will evaluate vendors’ abilities to execute interoperability abilities at their respective customer sites.
“This is a actually significant next step building upon the work that we started at the Keystone Summit,” states Daniel Nigrin, MD, CIO at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a member of the advisory team. “Because the team involves both contributor and vendor representatives, it will offer a balanced perspective in attempts to make better the measurement tool that was elaborated at the summit, with the mutual target of making better the state of interoperability in this country.”
In addition to Nigrin, the advisory team involves other eminent interoperability experts: John Halamka, MD, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Stan Huff, MD, CMIO at Intermountain Healthcare; and Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.
Members of the advisory team drawn from the vendor community involve: Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, MEDITECH, Greenway, McKesson, Epic, GE Healthcare, MEDHOST, and NextGen Healthcare—all of whom have accepted to the steps of interoperability and ongoing reporting.
“This is a really significant threshold moment we have arrived at in the industry,” comments Tripathi. “It is not simple to get this type of agreement among contributors and vendors. I consider it speaks to the fact the industry is changing. Persons understand that we are in a new world here, and we have got to get this done, driven by the private sector. ”
The interoperability survey has started and will be completed and publicly reported by late September of the year 2016, in accordance to advisory team facilitator Bob Cash, vice president of provider relations at KLAS.
“We completed the questionnaire deployed on feedback we received at the Keystone Summit previous year and just recently initiated that out to the field to collect data from clinical end users,” states Cash, adding that KLAS is targeting approximately 500 contributors to gain their input, or over 40 or so consumers per EHR vendor.
Tripathi, who along with Halamka, Huff and Nigrin, assisted to establish the measurement tool for the survey analyzes that “unlike other type of survey instruments that KLAS has done in the past, this one is a lot more complicated and needs more governance because they are doing side-by-side comparisons of vendor interoperability and it has several variables—it is merely a different beast.” As a result of this complexity, he claims KLAS will truly call contributors and help walk them through the survey “instead of just throwing it over the transom.”
Finally, it is the user experience that matters most, Tripathi discusses, likening the procedure to having a Consumer Reports-like organization—in this case KLAS—collecting feedback from clinicians reporting on the usefulness of data exchanges.
“The one place where they differ from Consumer Reports is that KLAS does not have its own independent testing lab and does not really test vendor products,” he summarizes.
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