HIMSS13: A Fork in the Road - How Patients & Payment Are Forcing 'Open' Health IT

This year feels like a fork in the road at HIMSS13, with disruptive forces of patients, digital health, mobility and open standards driving innovation and renewed energy at the annual conference...Without transparency (in health IT and health finance) and data liquidity, bending the cost curve will continue to elude the U.S. health system.

At the recently concluded annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in New Orleans, 34,696 got to experience a yin and yang vibe that embodies the disruption that the health care IT industry is undergoing. That is, the full-on face-off between developers of health IT that have been long-closed to data liquidity and those vendors innovating on open standards and cloud-based platforms.

The culmination of this was the announcement of the not-for-profit organization called the CommonWell Alliance, an affiliation of six health IT vendors who are planning to adopt, promote and certify standards for interoperable health information. The first vendors committing to the CommonWell pledge were Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway, McKesson and RelayHealth...

This year feels like a fork in the road at HIMSS13, with disruptive forces of patients, digital health, mobility and open standards driving innovation and renewed energy at the annual conference. There are two driving forces underneath this quake: growing consumerism in health care and the fact that the U.S. is, in a word, broke. We have entered the value-based health care era, with annual family deductibles as high as $10,000 and new entrants coming onto health insurance rolls. Without transparency (in health IT and health finance) and data liquidity, bending the cost curve will continue to elude the U.S. health system.