Today we are here with Mark Dunnagan, CHESS Vice President of Health Informatics to talk about Interoperability, what it means, why it matters in health care, and how better access to patient data for the entire care team will lead to improved outcomes for patients at a lower cost.
Mark Dunnagan, welcome to the Move to Value podcast.
Thanks, Thomas. Glad to be here.
So, Mark, today I want to talk a little bit about interoperability with you. So, can you first off explain what interoperability is?
Well, in the in the simplest terms, interoperability at least in in my travels is a is a metaphor for a conversation. Think of it like provider A wants to talk to provider B about patient Mark and it's a means of making that happen.
And why is interoperability important for healthcare?
Well, I think in line with the metaphor of the conversation, you know, I think fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years ago when you only had one physician and they knew everything about you. You know, maybe it made sense, but in modern times with you know the various ways of receiving care, you know it, physicians don't know everything about you and there's no way for those forms that you fill out, you know, annoyingly so, when you go to the physician's office can express everything that has happened to you. Interoperability is, is the key to that. Again, to know where Mark's been and what happened to Mark and why it may have happened.
Well Mark, can you share a real world example of how interoperability provides value to healthcare?
So, I can and it's part and parcel of that what we do on the value side literally every day. We receive what we call ADT feeds. It's basically a notification that you know one of the patients under our care has recently checked into a hospital or has recently depending on the depth of the ADT Feed perhaps been seen out of network or gone to specialty services or whatnot. But that ADT Feed that notification that that one of the lives that we care about has been touched in some way by healthcare entities around us gives us information that we need to know to intervene appropriately. That if someone has been discharged home that we can you know abide by our contractual obligations to check in on them. That if someone has been seen out of network perhaps you know seeking high cost, high value services that we can make sure we understand what and why. And again provided you know the appropriate care management or interventions to help them with that. So again you know that is part and parcel what my teams deal with every day in a in a huge part of of the services that we provide. Without that form of interoperability we would struggle to provide the value that we do.
That’s fascinating. So, so we've established that the need for patient data exchange between providers is very important. How can we, how can we continue to close this information gap, how can we make this a better exchange?
There's a million answers to this. I think I think that the foundational elements to make interoperability real or are there and to be honest with you have been there for some time Now, granted, what becomes interoperable meaning the data that we need to share continues to expand. You know of late; you know care plans and then the ingestion or the sharing of perhaps behavioral health information, you know the breadth of the data continues to expand. But the notions of interoperability have always been there as far as the structure, you know, the, the shape if you will, of the data and how it's exchanged and then kind of the language, the nomenclature, the codified values there, there are at least examples and standard terminologies that can be used for most everything. I think you know, for me the struggles, if you will, continue to be around, you know, adoption and certainly EMR technologies take...
