The Future of Healthcare: Our Promise to HIEs

Article Summary


Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are critical to the movement of patient data across systems and technical barriers — connecting payers, providers, and patients — making these exchanges the epicenter of many healthcare communities. Health Catalyst is committed to the long-term success of HIEs and will continue to invest in infrastructure, people, and processes to support healthcare community growth. Our position and action plan for connected communities and strong population health and value-based care initiatives include the following:

1. Our vision for HIE
2. The Health Catalyst roadmap and pathways to success
3. Our long-term commitment to HIE and HIE sustainability

HIEs

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are the epicenter of many healthcare communities, proving critical to the movement of patient data across systems and technical barriers. The transformative efforts of HIEs to connect payers, providers, and patients have become the building blocks for system interoperability. “It’s not just about having data to do the analysis. It’s about having actionable data that helps build outcomes. This is where Health Information Exchanges come in.” -Micky Tripathi, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

Health Catalyst believes that HIEs are the linchpin to a strong population health and value-based care initiative. Making your exchange viable for long-term success is important to us, and that’s why we are continuing to invest in infrastructure, people, and processes to support your growth. Our shared passion for improving the health of communities drives our commitment to partner with HIEs now and long into the future. We want to share our position and action plan for connected communities through:

  1. Our vision for HIE 
  2. The Health Catalyst roadmap and pathways to success
  3. Our long-term commitment to HIE and HIE sustainability 

Our Vision for Health Information Exchange (HIE)

Our vision for Health Information Exchange (HIE) encompasses innovation that drives high-quality data for measurable improvement in healthcare. This focus on creating the most comprehensive and flexible end-to-end solution will advance system interoperability and produce valuable analytical insights for organizations to harness into action. 

Payers, IDNs, hospitals, health systems, public health, and many other healthcare providers are often unable to exchange data on their own; however, each piece of patient data from their care setting contributes to the effectiveness of optimal care coordination. HIEs provide tremendous value to integrated care delivery by integrating patient information from these critical data sources. 

We believe HIEs are uniquely positioned to support a value-based health care system, so Health Catalyst has made strategic investments to bring cutting-edge technology and immense knowledge to our HIE customers. Our KPI Ninja acquisition produces a competitive advantage in the marketplace with its cloud-native technology and advanced data management tools for HIEs. Cloud-native technologies are highly desirable because of their flexibility and scalability in application performance. More than 22 million lives are managed in KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst platform, with over 20,000 users accessing the platform’s robust capabilities.

KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst capitalizes on all data sources by exchanging FHIR, Hl7 V2, CCDs, APIs, direct database connections, and flat files, for example. These tools drive achievable HIE sustainability models and fuel more productive data analysis.

“Health Information Exchanges have succeeded in their trailblazing efforts to facilitate data exchange and become interoperability models for all types of healthcare organizations,” remarks Dan Burton, Health Catalyst Chief Executive Officer. “Analytics and data-driven insights shape the future of healthcare delivery, and we are proud to offer that innovation today to HIEs through KPI Ninja and other world-class solutions.”

KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst is a key component of realizing our vision for HIE with the platform’s ability to maximize the HIE data and instill trust among HIE stakeholders and users. One HIE customer is building a statewide health information network to connect physicians, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and clinical laboratories across Wisconsin. KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst integrated with the HIE’s Data Mart within 14 days to successfully parse C-CDAs and combine C-CDA data with parsed HL7 v2s, both structured and unstructured data, into a Unified Data Model. The integration helped launch a COVID-19 analytic solution supporting their Public Health’s pandemic response.

Now that this technology infrastructure is built, the HIE has used the build process to support a variety of use cases related to population health and value-based care with health plans, providers, and others. 

The combination of our strong client relationships and comprehensive data set with KPI Ninja’s advanced technologies help assure that customers feel the value of the health information exchange infrastructure,” said one HIE customer. “We do the heavy lifting from a technical end so that our participants can use clinical insights to decrease inefficiencies while upholding the highest quality of care.”

We know the value in the usability of HIE data. We aim to help HIEs turn their interoperability successes into strategic conversations around quality improvement, care management, transitions, utilization analytics, and many other best care practices. 

Roadmap for the Future

HIEs are instrumental in aiding healthcare providers to improve care quality cost-effectively while moving the needle on population health efforts and patient outcomes. The exchange of health information broadens a clinician’s view and enables a patient’s care team to achieve measurable improvement in managing their patient populations. Our forthcoming integration plan for HIEs will address specific pain points about interoperability, data normalization, analytics, care management, and population health, to name a few. 

Immediate enhancements available to HIEs through our KPI Ninja acquisition position HIEs to become the data transit hub of population health management initiatives. The KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst cloud-native architecture and expertise fill gaps in interoperability with real-time, streaming, and FHIR support. 

We see tremendous opportunity in the convergence of interoperability and value-based care,” says Vineeth Yeddula, CEO of KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst. “HIEs will drive value through accelerating rapid data exchange, offering interoperability-enabled analytics and empowering participants to improve health care more efficiently.

HIEs have unique and complex requirements to facilitate data exchange. Our product acquisition and roadmap strategies underscore our commitment to healthcare transformation through innovative solutions. Through Health Catalyst, HIEs can expect the ability to:

  • Effectively parse CCDAs, FHIR, and other clinical data beyond standard HL7 V2
  • Receive support for 42 CFR data access rules
  • Support agnostic inbound/outbound capabilities
  • Address data quality and vocabulary normalization 
  • Provide customizable business intelligence and population health analytics 
  • Achieve long-term success 

Patient data that is comprehensive, accurate, and actionable can drive productive healthcare conversations and boost a patient’s experience and overall satisfaction with their provider. Health Catalyst will work with HIEs to resolve their data pain points for real-time data-driven insights and expanded technology utilization. 

Sustaining Health Information Exchange (HIE)

HIEs are faced with mounting tasks to accurately transmit data, and many are doing so through decreased federal funding and increased expectations on performance and capabilities. Technology vendors may not deliver on promises to support HIEs, forcing many exchanges to change their platforms or pivot their operations. 

Health Catalyst provides the stability HIEs need to sustain their technology efforts partnered with the innovation necessary to meet the demands of today’s evolving healthcare landscape. KPI Ninja by Health Catalyst delivers the technical expertise for HIEs to leverage data elements for big picture insights and analysis into a population’s health patterns. 

Improving population health through investing in HIE will provide innovation opportunities to compete in today’s evolution from transactional data points to enterprise access to information. HIEs will be able to offer financially-viable services and hone in on scalability solutions to support new partnerships across communities.

Foundation for the Future

Communities reap the benefits of HIE participation because exchanges are the foundation of interoperability. The Health Catalyst customer, sales, support, and leadership teams have been listening to your HIE needs, aligning the best technology to drive long-term sustainability efforts. Our objective is to bring HIEs to strategic interoperability discussions as healthcare organizations plot their path to connected care and align their value-based care initiatives with the right technology solutions. 

Our platform provides stability and certainty as we actively advance the capabilities with next-gen tools to support evolving healthcare communities. Our HIE clients are doing tremendous work around the country, and we look forward to sharing their best practices with our network of exchanges, providers, and other healthcare stakeholders. 

Communities thrive when data is accurate and shared amongst an entire care team. Our vision for improved population health is through investing in HIE, and we believe the future of success is with you as the solution for better healthcare.

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