Today I’ve been spending time learning about healthcare interoperability at the DirectTrust Summit. It’s an incredible coming together of health IT professionals who truly understand the nuances related to making interoperability a reality in healthcare. It’s easy to armchair quarterback the need for healthcare to share data and it’s another to dive into the weeds and the nuances for what it takes to really make it happen.
One of the biggest challenges related to healthcare interoperability was highlighted so perfectly in this tweet by Susan Houck Clark from Briljent who was quoting Amit Trivedi, Director, Informatics & Health IT Standards at HIMSS.
“governance is the thorniest issue to tackle” – @a3vedi
Yep. #DirectTrustSummit https://t.co/A91j1uAPfQ— Susan Houck Clark (@SusanHouckClark) June 9, 2021
Governance is a tricky thing. Especially when you’re trying to bring together so many competing interests to try and create a common goal or at least a common result. In this case, DirectTrust has done this a lot as they bring health IT vendors, provider organizations, government bodies, and others to create a common health IT standard or even their implementation guides. Reasonable people can disagree and a good governance structure that can work through those differences and come out the other end with a workable solution is hard, but powerful.
In one of the networking sessions I attended (which went over by an hour because the discussion was so good), Ed Simcox, Chief Strategy Officer at LifeOmic and Former CTO of HHS commented on how the same thing was necessary to make progress with the government. There are a lot of competing interests and it’s essential for those competing interests to understand each other in order to come to a workable solution.
Related to this was another observation that Scott Stuewe, President and CEO of DirectTrust shared:
“Consensus building is a dish served slow.”
– @StueweScott#DirectTrustSummit— Susan Houck Clark (@SusanHouckClark) June 9, 2021
I think we all get a little frustrated with this process. I know we can all see areas of healthcare that would benefit from better healthcare interoperability, better governance, and more consensus. We’re tired of waiting. However, I think Stuewe is right that it’s a dish served slow. COVID turned that slightly on its ear, but that only lasts so long and slow is relative.
