Health interoperability can seem like such an impersonal concept — but at its core are people, specifically patients, whose care can be severely hindered by a lack of data exchange. At the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in March, Health Gorilla had a chance to help bring interoperability to life.
The HIMSS22 Interoperability Showcase on Nationwide Connected Care demonstrated how a fictional patient could successfully navigate the healthcare system with a chronic and acute condition in multiple locations.
Maylee Wu, Health Gorilla’s Vice President of Product Development, joined the CommonWell Health Alliance and participating vendors athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, MatrixCare, and MEDITECH in following the journey of “Oscar,” a traveling nurse who is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis by his primary care physician in his hometown of Buffalo, New York.
While working in Louisiana several months later, Oscar comes down with a respiratory infection and pneumonia and is sent to a neurologist who accesses his past medical records via Health Gorilla’s Patient360. Throughout the demonstration, Oscar’s providers — represented by vendors — are able to leverage auto-linking, event notifications, smart record locator services, and discrete data exchange via HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) at a national scale. This allows them to organize Oscar’s care to inform better care decisions, decrease total cost of patient care, and avoid readmissions.
“Oscar had smooth transitions and care coordination not only across multiple providers and different health IT systems but across more than a thousand miles … all to ensure that Oscar was the priority when it came to coordinating his care,” said Liz Buckle, Director of Product, CommonWell Health Alliance.
Watch the full video below and read a detailed description of Oscar’s use case here.
If your organization is in need of an interoperability solution, the Health Gorilla team is here to help. Visit the Patient360 page to learn how we enable developers and providers to retrieve medical records electronically from over 65,000 care sites seamlessly. If you have any additional questions or are interested in exploring a partnership with Health Gorilla, please contact us.
