ORLANDO – When asked if the company has an overarching theme as it prepares to open its booth here at HIMSS24 Tuesday, Kathleen Aller, head of InterSystems’ global healthcare market strategy, gives a simple answer: “Health data and interoperability, and the things who makes it possible.”
That goal – easy to define but extremely complex to achieve – will be familiar to anyone who has watched the company and all the work it has done over the past four decades to connect organizations from all corners of the healthcare ecosystem.
“Interoperability is and has always been our foundation,” said Aller. “We do interoperability at scale.”
And despite all the work done over the past forty years to lay the foundation for seamless information exchange with the right data at the right time for the right people, these efforts are arguably more important now. than ever.
“If you look at where the industry is going, where you look at artificial intelligence, you can’t do AI if the data isn’t ready, if it’s not comprehensive,” she said. “You need the technology to manage it. And we have that technology. You need to build AI solutions and embed them in healthcare applications. And we do that.”
In addition to supporting AI initiatives, InterSystems has a number of other key priorities that it wants to highlight during HIMSS24.
High among them: looming interoperability mandates for health plans, with CMS rules require application programming interfaces for payer-to-payer data exchange.
“This is a big problem in the US,” says Aller. “APIs are part of that. But the APIs are the easy part. It’s about having a longitudinal record that the mandate assumes will be there. And I think it’s going to be critical to have the whole process in to set in motion and move.” people stick to the rules they have – the operational changes they need in 2026 and then the API implementations in 2027, and then continue to ramp up.”
InterSystems will also highlight its innovation work with a wide variety of different healthcare organizations, said Aller, noting that its platform “is built on Epic, built on by the VA, built on by 3M.”
It is also being built on by “a lot of young companies, many of which will be on our stand,” she said, “and we encourage people to come along and meet them.”
One of them has developed a ‘device that fits on your tooth and monitors your health through your saliva’. Another is using the technology to help patients match trials and give patients the choice to share their data and access the clinical trial network. “We have someone else looking at genomics.”
The VA will demonstrate some of their own interoperability use cases with InterSystems, as well as the eHealth Exchange, “talking a lot about what they’re doing on the QHIN and the work they’re doing to prove FHIR use cases on a national scale.”
As usual, InterSystems will also be a key part of the formidable Interoperability Showcase. We are part of her many years of participation HL7’s DaVinci project – designed to promote the expansion of FHIR across the industry, “we have a presentation that will be a joint presentation between Michael Marchant of UC Davis and Russ Leftwich of InterSystems and HL7. Jocelyn Keegan of Point of Care Partners, who is hosting the Da Vinci project, will also be present at our stand.”
Outside the booth, InterSystems will present several educational sessions, including one: “GenAI’s Got Talent – Can It Save Healthcare?” that was viewed here.
Another, which will be moderated by Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, focuses on “talking about digital health innovation beyond AI.” As part of the panel, Metadata Solutions, a clinical research organization, will demonstrate what it is doing to “collect real-world electronic evidence,” and 3M Health “will talk a little about what they do, and Jen will talk a little about what they do . bringing that together within a digital health framework.”
The third major session – which is by invitation only, but invitations can be requested – is a luncheon aimed at paying visitors, focusing on “regulation as a catalyst for innovation in the health plan and health plan strategy,” according to Aller. The presentation will feature Dominick Bizzarro, Chief Strategy Officer at MVP Health (and former Managing Director of InterSystems Health Share).
“He’ll talk about a flexible approach to strategic planning that’s informed by what the FBI and state regulators are doing and how you can integrate that and not make your whole approach to regulation a matter of, ‘I have to check that box,’ but rather, plan for the long term so that you can achieve compliance and also achieve your long-term goals. Aller explained.
As for new products and announcements, InterSystems has several.
“We just released our Intersystems Payer Solutions on our website, which are aimed at addressing the new interoperability and prior authorization mandate.
“And we’ll talk about our National Gateway Service, which is kind of a connection to connect to the QHINs or to Carequality or to CommonWell through a kind of one-stop shop.”
It will also highlight the research data pipeline, which is an FHIR-based feed TO ON research data models.
Aller says she is especially looking forward to the conversations she will have with customers, clients and other HIMSS24 participants.
“One of the challenges of InterSystems is that we are quite broad, so we serve those who build solutions, those who provide care, those who pay for care. One of the conversations we will have is we crowdsource opinions on genAI and where it’s going and where people see the best use of genAI.
“We’ve done a survey at a number of other events, and we’re going to do it at HIMSS. We encourage people to come and have their say,” she added.
“One of the data points that we made very strongly is that when we ask people what they see as the biggest risk of Gen AI, it’s around releasing patient data into the public domain, either without consent or unintentionally, or both .
“When we looked at a survey of about 134 respondents, we saw that 45% of them cited this as their biggest concern. So that’s going to be one of the things I’d like to talk to people about: how can we mitigate? What does that mean? that? We have to think from a product point of view, from a governance point of view: where are we going with that? How does that affect our future?”
InterSystems will be at booth #1361 at HIMSS24.