EHR Vendors Agree to Uniform Interoperability Metrics

EHR Vendors Agree to Uniform Interoperability Metrics

Executives of 12 major electronic health record vendors met earlier this month and have agreed to interoperability metrics that participants are calling Consumer Reports-like in their design and the first of their kind for the healthcare industry.

Companies at the summit that vendor research firm KLAS Enterprises convened included: Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic, GE Healthcare, Greenway, Healthland, McKesson, MEDITECH, MEDHOST, and NextGen Healthcare.

The vendors adopted a standard interoperability measurement tool developed by John Halamka, M.D., Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Stan Huff, M.D., Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Intermountain Healthcare, Daniel Nigrin, M.D., Chief Information Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative.

Tripathi led and moderated the KLAS Keystone Summit held in Midway, Utah, which included provider CIOs as well as EHR vendors who agreed by consensus to the measures of interoperability and ongoing reporting. According to Tripathi, the goal of the KLAS initiative is to assess nationwide interoperability, for which the industry doesn’t currently have good benchmarks. “We literally don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “We just have no ability to measure it at a nationwide level.”

“I don’t know of any measurements of interoperability in the industry,” commented Huff.  “So, in that sense, this new proposal from KLAS puts the ball on the field. There is now at least one survey of vendor interoperability. I think the survey is a good starting place for measuring interoperability.”

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