Do We Need Another Interoperability Group?

Over the last few years, industry groups dedicated to interoperability have been popping up like mushrooms after a hard rain. All seem to be dedicated to solving the same set of intractable data sharing problems.

The latest interoperability initiative on my radar, known as the Da Vinci Project, is focused on supporting value-based care.

The Da Vinci Project, which brings together more than 20 healthcare companies, is using HL7 FHIR to foster VBC (Value Based Care). Members include technology vendors, providers, and payers, including Allscripts, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Cerner, Epic, Rush University Medical Center, Surescripts, UnitedHealthcare, Humana and Optum. The initiative is hosted by HL7 International.

Da Vinci project members plan to develop a common set of standards for data exchange that can be used nationally. The idea is to help partner organizations avoid spending money on one-off data sharing development projects.

The members are already at work on two test cases, one addressing 30-day medication reconciliation and the other coverage requirements discovery. Next, members will begin work on test cases for document templates and coverage rules, along with eHealth record exchange in support of HEDIS/STARS and clinician exchange.

Of course, these goals sound good in theory. Making it simpler for health plans, vendors and providers to create data sharing standards in common is probably smart.

The question is, is this effort really different from others fronted by Epic, Cerner and the like? Or perhaps more importantly, does its approach suffer from limitations that seem to have crippled other attempts at fostering interoperability?

As my colleague John Lynn notes, it’s probably not wise to be too ambitious when it comes to solving interoperability problems. “One of the major failures of most interoperability efforts is that they’re too ambitious,” he wrote earlier this year. “They try to do everything and since that’s not achievable, they end up doing nothing.”

John’s belief – which I share — is that it makes more sense to address “slices of interoperability” rather than attempt to share everything with everyone.

It’s possible that the Da Vinci Project may actually be taking such a practical approach. Enabling partners to create point-to-point data sharing solutions easily sounds very worthwhile, and could conceivably save money and improve care quality. That’s what we’re all after, right?

Still, the fact that they’re packaging this as a VBC initiative gives me pause. Hey, I know that fee-for-service reimbursement is on its way out and that it will take new technology to support new payment models, but is this really what happening here? I have to wonder.

Bottom line, if the giants involved are still slapping buzzwords on the project, I’m not sure they know what they’re doing yet. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see where they go with it.

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.

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