Hospitals, Groups Come Together To Create Terminology For Interoperability

A health IT trade coalition dedicated to supporting data interoperability has kicked off an effort providing fuel for shareable health IT app development.

The Healthcare Services Platform Consortium, whose members include Intermountain Healthcare, the American Medical Association, Louisiana State University, the Veterans Health Administration and the Regenstrief Institute, is working to increase interoperability by defining open, standards-based specifications for enterprise clinical services and clinical applications.

Its members came together to to create a services-oriented architecture platform that supports a new marketplace for interoperable healthcare applications, according to Healthcare Informatics. Stan Huff, MD, CMIO of Intermountain, has said that he’d like to see more shareable clinical decision support modules developed.

Now, in furtherance of these goals, HSPC members are throwing their support behind an initiative known as SOLOR, which calls for integrating SNOMED CT and Laboratory LOINC, as well as selected components of RxNorm. According to the group, SOLOR will provide a terminology foundation for CIMI (Clinical Information Modeling Initiative) efforts, as well as FHIR profile development.

“We hope SOLOR can serve as a foundation to deliver sharable clinical decision-support capability both within the VA and ultimately throughout the nation’s healthcare system,” said Veterans Health Administration deputy CMIO for strategy and functional design Jonathan Nebeker, M.S., M.D., in a prepared statement.

Ultimately, HSPC hopes to create an “app store” model for plug-and-play healthcare applications. As HSPC envisions it, the app store will support common services and models that vendors can use to shorten software development lifecycles.

Not only that, the evolving standards-oriented architecture will allow multiple providers and other organizations to each deliver different parts of a solution set. This solution set will be designed to address care coordination, gaps in workflow between systems and workflows that cut across acute care, ambulatory care and patient-centered medical home models.

Industry players have already created a small selection of apps built on the SMART technology platform, roughly three dozen to date. The apps, some of which are experimental, include a tool estimating a patient’s cardiac risk, a SMART patient portal, a tool for accessing the Cerner HIE on SMART and an app called RxCheck offering real-time formulary outcomes, adherence data, clinical protocols and predictive analytics for individual patients.

Now, leaders of the HSPC – notably Intermountain’s Huff – would like to scale up the process of interoperable app development substantially. According to Healthcare Informatics, Huff told an audience that while his organization already has 150 such apps, he’d like to see many more. “With the budget we have and other constraints, we’ll never get from 150 to 5,000,” Huff said. “We realized that we needed to change the paradigm.”

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

Categories