It’s rare you read an article about health tech and not see the word "interoperability" at some point, probably more than once. If that were a drinking game, we’d all be really drunk by now. Today I speak with Don Lee, a fellow podcast host about how Health Information Exchanges, otherwise known as HIEs, can assist us in the short term to get our data integration act together. This is a little bit of a reality check— blockchain and more elegant solutions might be coming, but today, right now, we need to meet quality measures. And you can’t meet quality measures without having a handle on the trips to the ER, eye exams, and specialist visits that are transpiring outside the four walls of any given provider office.
Don Lee is an accomplished Health IT expert with a 20-year track record of driving value with technology.
Don began his career as custom software developer and eventually built and lead a team of more than 30 engineers. Later, he was the subject matter expert, product manager and head of sales and marketing for a digital health startup that launched a SaaS-platform focused on administrative simplification in healthcare.
Today, Don is President of Glide Health IT, LLC, a consulting firm that helps forward-looking organizations align their Health IT and business strategies. The firm specializes in business and product development with a focus on data aggregation, interop, analytics and quality measurement.
Don is also the founder, co-host and Executive Producer of The #HCBiz Show!, a podcast dedicated to unraveling the Business of Healthcare.
00:00 Don talks the meaning of Interoperability.
01:30 The problem with interoperability.
02:00 The data sharing risk.
02:25 The change in the interoperability conversation because of Quality Measures.
04:15 The elusive concept of interoperability.
05:50 The best path forward - HIEs.
08:25 “One of the biggest hurdles of Healthcare Interoperability is there is so many people working on Healthcare Interoperability.”
09:15 “We got to be smarter about what we choose to compete on.”
10:10 The issues with the expectations of the digitization of healthcare.
12:50 Currently successful and well-covered HIE groups.
14:00 HIPAA & formatting health data.
18:15 The problem with provider data and the need for a good directory.
20:00 Why it’s important that Health Systems know who is in each of their Health Plans.
24:25 What’s being done to try and fix provider lists for Health Plans.
28:00 You can learn more by going to glidehealthit.com or don.lee@glidehealthit.com or by going to thehcbiz.com to listen to Don’s podcast.