| | November 201919UTLOOK Healthcare Tech Over the years, the two contributing factors to the evolution of healthcare industry are the billions of dollars that have been invested in the IT healthcare arena and the numerous electronic health record (EHR) vendors who have enhanced and elevated interoperability and exchange of information. Other contributing factors are the enterprise data warehouses, data platforms, and the ease of analytics, which has become crucial to the process of interoperability. Apart from all this, innovations like artificial intelligence and machine learning have also become an inevitable factor transforming the healthcare sector. Today, healthcare organizations are on a constant quest to find the best of breed EHR vendors and solution providers, but unfortunately, it is an arduous task. It is an absolute necessity for vendors to meet the criteria for MIPS (Merit-Based Incentive Payment System) and MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015) reporting. Furthermore, transparency has become a priority today for the healthcare consumer. This can be considered as an extension of HIPAA, where the patient information is shareable and the patients can access their healthcare information from a specific application. This will enable them to present data from one physician to another who uses a different healthcare system with ease.Big Data Solutions for Population Health ManagementIn our organization, we possess an enterprise data warehouse, which contains structured data, additionally, we have two big data platforms of which one is on cloud and the other on-premise. The one on the cloud is called `server healthy intent', which is used for population health management to identify gaps in healthcare. More than 60,000 patients are registered on this platform, which makes it easier for us to manage and access data. The data of all these patients are fed from disparate electronic health record systems and this information is harnessed from different sources that include the physician's practice, various hospitals, nursing centers and so on. Moreover, the health information exchange system that we have, serves and benefits the community as all the information and results are brought to the big data platform, which enhances population health management. Major electronic health record vendors such as Cerner and Apex use their own platform for analytics as they have identified that their customers prefer a one-stop stop solution provider. Cerner uses a protocol known as `healthy intent' and Apex uses a protocol known as `healthy planet,' these population healthcare data analytics platforms aid in closing the gaps in the healthcare sector. From a population health care perspective, Innovations that Enhance Public Healthcare By John Kravitz, CIO, Geisinger HealthJohn KravitzCIO INSIGHTS
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