Las Vegas served as a vibrant backdrop for last week’s HLTH 2023 conference and Health Gorilla was proud to be among its sponsors. At booth 3029 in the bustling Convention Center West Hall, our team highlighted innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges in the health data sharing arena.

Attendees converged on the booth to hear about Health Gorilla’s new Patient Access solution, launched just two weeks before the event. CLEAR,  a secure identity verification platform, was on hand to provide demonstrations of the authentication process. Health Gorilla announced our partnership with CLEAR in March 2023 to launch consumer access to personal health information, starting in Puerto Rico.

Patient Access allows healthcare organizations to access data by enabling consumers to submit queries to national health information networks under the Individual Access Services (IAS) purpose of use.

“The promise of this verified access is really being able to access all of the data through a single authentication,” Chief Medical Officer Steven Lane, MD, MPH, said during Monday’s session “Empowering Individual Access and Facilitating Consent-Based Health Record Sharing for Organizations.” 

The session included Dr. Lane and Health Gorilla’s Executive Director of Strategy and Partnerships Avery Haller and focused on bridging the gap between individuals and organizations, facilitating consent-based access to health records from national health information networks, and ensuring that data privacy and security are paramount. 

Leading up to the event, the buzz about Health Gorilla was strong – with our announcement about 17 healthcare organizations who have committed to join our candidate Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). This included HealthTap, which released its own press release, as well as Virta Health, Canvas Medical, Evernorth Health Services, and Sesame, in the news recently because of a new partnership with Costco. These commitments are a testament to our dedication to enhancing health data sharing while meeting and exceeding requirements for safeguarding patient data privacy and security.

We were also excited to unveil new lab capabilities within Amwell’s Converge virtual care platform and Lifescan Health announced our collaboration to improve diagnostic solutions for telehealth and conventional care providers alike.

Amwell’s Chief Product Officer Matthew McAllister and Vice President of Product Management Cara Munnis joined our Co-founder and CEO Steve Yaskin for an insightful discussion about the emergence of virtual and hybrid care models and the state of the overall healthcare market.

National data exchange also had its moment in the limelight, with a presentation from Dr. Lane and Chief Customer Officer Dave Cassel that kicked things off Sunday afternoon. They talked about the impact and value of TEFCA, and addressed potential misconceptions about the new chapter of nationwide health information sharing.

That discussion was followed by “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader: Interoperability Edition,” with a panel of contestants being quizzed on TEFCA, health exchange purposes, and patient privacy concerns. Healthcare Scene Editor and Founder John Lynn eked out a come-from-behind win against the formidable HIT Like a Girl Pod CMO Shereese Maynard and HealthLeaders Media’s Eric Wicklund – walking away with not only bragging rights but an impressively bedazzled gorilla trophy. 

This being the first-ever health tech game show (as far as we know), there were a couple of rough spots but it was all in good fun. “It’s the pilot episode of this show and we’re working out a few kinks,” game show Cassel quipped early on. “And just to be clear, no 5th graders were harmed in any of the preparations or the production of this session here.”

On Monday, Health Gorilla’s Executive Director of Strategy and Partnerships Avery Haller led a discussion with Art Lopez of FindHelp and Diana Zuskov of LexisNexis Risk Solutions on the essential 3 components of a successful social determinants of health (SDOH) program – Data, Platform, and Referrals.

“We have data on 280 something million Americans so when we were designing our SDOH data set we really thought about what are the appropriate uses of this data for health equity needs – how do we ensure that we have ethical standards around that,” Zuskov said. “We go through a very detailed process of understanding how our customers are storing and using this data, how it's applied at the provider and at the patient level. There is a lot of sensitivity around this data and we need to make sure that we're very thoughtful stewards of it.”

On Tuesday, moderator Jitin Asnaani, executive advisor and former Executive Director of CommonWell Health Alliance, Derek Plansky, Senior Vice President, Product Management, and Sergio Wagner, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Health Gorilla, discussed the pain of prior authorization in the session “Prior Auth: Is It a Data or a Workflow Problem?” The current proposed rule from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), “Advancing Interoperability and Improving Prior Authorization Processes,” has payers and providers looking for solutions to speed up their prior authorization management prior to the 2026 compliance date. 

Prior authorization is still largely done manually and via fax – and moving away from this won’t be easy.

“I think it's going to be very interesting,” Plansky said. “There will be little bright spots of success and we'll definitely try and champion and grow those, but they are going to be some really messy things on the boundaries.”

“I think that it is going to be about understanding the market, understanding the problem, and being thoughtful and disciplined in terms of executing towards solving a problem,” Wagner said. “Sometimes in crisis, there lies opportunity.”

Following this discussion, the last session was an in-person recording of InteropTalk and as always the panelists pulled no punches when it came to discussion about patient access, identity challenges, and what is needed to make sure bad actors don’t take advantage.

“We are over-caffeinated, unprepared, and ready to talk interoperability,” Cassel said at the beginning of episode 10, “so this should be exciting and free flowing.”

All session recordings, including InteropTalk, will be available on our Video Library page. Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know about new videos.

And if you missed out on HLTH but would still like to meet with us, you can always get in touch here. 

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