[{"innerBlocks":[],"name":"core\/freeform","postId":4753,"blockType":{"name":"core\/freeform","keywords":[],"attributes":{"content":{"type":"string","source":"raw"},"lock":{"type":"object"}},"providesContext":[],"usesContext":[],"selectors":[],"supports":{"className":false,"customClassName":false,"reusable":false},"styles":[],"variations":[],"apiVersion":3,"title":"Classic","description":"Use the classic WordPress editor.","category":"text"},"originalContent":"As the healthcare industry grapples with the daunting challenges of achieving interoperability, stakeholders are focused on solving the fundamental problem of ensuring that all parties \u201cspeak the same language,\u201d through the use of common data models and vocabularies.

Semantic interoperability, the ability of two or more healthcare systems to share clinical information and use it meaningfully, is a critical requirement for enabling population health management and the rapidly approaching transition from fee-for-service to value-based care models.

However, the lack of a universal terminology standard is a major barrier to communication between different electronic health record systems and the ability to derive clinical meaning from EHR data imported or queried from elsewhere.

\u201cThere\u2019s not always a shared language. There\u2019s no agreement on a common data alphabet, if you will, about how technology will speak to different systems but also to new and emerging systems,\u201d said National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, at this week\u2019s HIMSS16 conference in Las Vegas.

However, Brian Levy, MD, chief medical officer for terminology management vendor Health Language, points out that semantic interoperability is not just a problem for the electronic exchange of data between disparate EHR systems at different healthcare organizations. Levy says it\u2019s not uncommon for the IT department in a large health system to be charged with governing content for 40 or more information systems\u2014all with their own inherent language and clinical terminology infrastructure.

On Monday at HIMSS16, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced that companies providing 90 percent of the EHRs used by U.S. hospitals and more than a dozen of the country\u2019s largest private healthcare systems have pledged to implement three core commitments that will improve the flow of health information to consumers and providers.

\u201cWe\u2019ve got lots of big, successful vendors and they produce good software, but each vendor has a proprietary database and they use proprietary terminologies,\u201d adds Stan Huff, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Intermountain Healthcare. \u201cAs a result, the data isn\u2019t consistent between any two systems, so it\u2019s not easy to exchange data. And, even within the same EHR vendor, the systems can be configured differently and are not truly interoperable.\u201d

The goal, according to Huff, should be to make data consistent through standardization of information models that are mapped to clinical terminology standards such as LOINC and SNOMED. \u201cThose models become, if you will, a common language around which we can exchange and use information that is non-proprietary, that everyone can support, and creates the ability then to create applications that can run on any platform that supports the standards.\u201d

Huff is chairman of the board of the Healthcare Services Platform Consortium, a group of providers, vendors, system integrators and venture-led firms dedicated to solving the industry-wide interoperability problem. HSPC is attempting to create a next-generation IT platform to build a services architecture foundation that includes standard clinical-data models and terminologies to achieve true semantic interoperability.

According to Health Language\u2019s Levy, accountable care, health information exchange, population health management and value-based care models are all challenged by the current lack of semantic interoperability across the healthcare industry. The Health Language platform is designed to standardize and normalize data from across disparate systems by mapping, translating, updating and managing standard and enhanced clinical terminologies.

\u201cFHIR is still pretty nascent, and one of the next challenges is figuring out how to standardize the content in the FHIR messages,\u201d<\/bsp-quote>\u201cThe deeper level of interoperability, where we play, is semantic interoperability,\u201d says Levy. \u201cOrganizations need more than just to see the information of the EHR. They need to understand it in a meaningful way. We can\u2019t effectively leverage all this data through analytics unless we have normalized data to make sense of the data in the first place.\u201d

HL7\u2019s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is gaining momentum as an open health data standard that offers a promising approach to meeting the demand for semantic interoperability and minimizing the need for metadata translation services. FHIR is supported by a rich information model to achieve semantic interoperability of clinical data.

For its part, Health Language is planning to incorporate FHIR into its product offerings within the next two years, with the standard being used to both extract and upload data for seamless data management.

\u201cFHIR is still pretty nascent, and one of the next challenges is figuring out how to standardize the content in the FHIR messages,\u201d concludes Levy. \u201cIt is an ongoing process to make sure that FHIR has standard value sets and terminology services that are supported.\u201d","saveContent":"As the healthcare industry grapples with the daunting challenges of achieving interoperability, stakeholders are focused on solving the fundamental problem of ensuring that all parties \u201cspeak the same language,\u201d through the use of common data models and vocabularies.

Semantic interoperability, the ability of two or more healthcare systems to share clinical information and use it meaningfully, is a critical requirement for enabling population health management and the rapidly approaching transition from fee-for-service to value-based care models.

However, the lack of a universal terminology standard is a major barrier to communication between different electronic health record systems and the ability to derive clinical meaning from EHR data imported or queried from elsewhere.

National efforts take aim at reaching semantic interoperability

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