Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way

June 3, 2016

Categories: Thought Leadership

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In early May, health care stakeholders from the public and private sectors came together at the seventh annual Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C to share ideas and discuss progressive policy moving forward. Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt gave a decisive keynote speech with a powerful message to Health IT: lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Concerning interoperability initiatives, Slavitt pushed:

If you want to lead the way with innovations that help consumers, great. If you want to follow by using established standards for data and measurement and technology, also great. If you have a business model which relies on silo-ing data, not using standards, or not allowing data to follow the needs of patients, pick a new business model or pick a new business.

With clarity, Slavitt expressed that CMS and the federal government is sick of subsidizing the cost of health IT programs built by vendors who value their products over the health outcomes that they can improve.

Slavitt offered the following Health IT best practices to the room packed with industry leaders:

• Eliminate language from contracts that slows down plug and play systems
• Make all data machine readable on an edge server so it can be securely and easily referenced
• Provide physicians with real-time patient data that feeds into workflows not a portal
• Use open APIs to unlock early EHR decisions from physicians’ desktops

Slavitt’s appeal isn’t falling on deaf ears. At CNSI, we ensure that all of our solutions go above and beyond requirements to improve real-world outcomes for more than 28 million Americans. After all, as Slavitt put it, “At this stage, there is no room for business practices that don’t match the need of patients.”

Were you at this year’s Health Datapalooza? What did you think about Slavitt’s message? What measures are you taking to ensure that your company is moving in the right direction? Let us know by finding us on Twitter @CNSICorp.