More practical, relevant, and actionable health IT advice to be doled out at HealthIMPACT East in NYC on Wednesday

Our vision of providing a packed one day event focused on practical, relevant, and actionable health IT advice was very well received in Houston earlier this month. We wanted to focus not on canned PowerPoint decks and promotion of tech hype but specific advice on how and where to apply IT in healthcare settings. Based on some of the feedback we got, it looks like we struck a chord:

“I did enjoy the HealthIMPACT Forum in Houston and will definitely recommend attending. The information was of great value and it was enjoyable to meet and network with others. I look forward to next year!” – Barbara Presley, Clinical Documentation Improvement Program, University Medical Center Brackenridge

“HealthIMPACT seemed more focused with only high quality contributors and content. HealthIMPACT was collaborative with fewer ‘talking heads’ and more open and honest dialog. I truly felt that it was a more intimate environment for sharing.” – Zachery Jiwa, Innovation Fellow, US Department of Health and Human Services

“[The open format] allows for valuable exchange between participants. The forum consists of important topics and fluid discussions going where the audience wants to take it.” – George Conklin, Senior Vice President and CIO, Christus Health

I’m often asked why, as a health IT blogger, I wanted to lead HealthIMPACT. Here’s a three minute video overview:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McERC5fk7w0&w=450]

Based on the feedback from the Houston event and what we’ve heard from our surveys, below are some of the topics we’ve heard the audience wants covered during the day at HealthIMPACT East on Wednesday and future events coming up in Santa Monica, Nashville, and Chicago. Of course, not everything can be covered in one day but because we run a non traditional format we’ll cover a lot more ground because the audience decides where to take us.

Meaningful Use

• Assuring on-time and on-budget completion of projects (principally MU2), in the face of reduced reimbursement and personnel resources.
• Implementation of MU 2
• Meeting MU2 and CMS rules w/minimal impact on physician workflow/productivity
• Transition of Care (TOC) measure and use of CCDA & DIRECT Messaging
• Developing solutions that will satisfy conflicting requirements between CMS sections, without requiring staff to do multiplicative documentation.
• Effective Clinical Integration Ideas EHR (Epic Implementation)
• Epic implementation
• Interoperability legacy systems and modern systems
• Keeping track of rapid changes in software in the electronic health record
• Keeping track of changes from CMS
• Staying current of IT information that comes so fast
• Meaningful Use Audits
• Implementing electronic medical record
• Successfully attestation for Stage 2 Phase 1 MU
• Maintaining metrics in the face of ever changing regulatory requirements
• Transition of the traditional quality core measures to the electronic clinical quality measures
• Managing changes in workflows as new components in the EHR are implemented to meet meaningful use requirements

Patient Engagement

• How will involvement of patients in their own care change the way healthcare is practiced? Will it really?
• What efforts are being made to reach out to the average patient in the population so they can access and use the health care system the same way that the average person is able to use the banking or retail system?

Data Governance

• Ensuring data accuracy
• Control data output to ensure it is of highest quality and provides consistent outcomes.
• Data governance, measure burden, data analysis
• Strategies for accurate and reliable data entry
• Ensuring the quality of information within your EMR
• Use of computerized assisted clinical documentation or coding to improve clinical outcomes
• CAC, Computer Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD)
• Master Data Management
• Reconciliation of data between systems

Clinical Informatics

• Use of analytics/data to coordinate care and cut costs
• Developing Heath Care Data and Analytics division
• Knowledge of successful strategies to move forward clinical informatics agenda
• Population Heath and Data Mining
• Not seeing nursing informatics (N I) working in our healthcare facilities
• Seeing NI as a leaders in the field.
• Job availability for NI
• Ways in which nursing informatics is impacting healthcare
• The integration of Nursing informatics as a part of IT in healthcare
• Focus on nursing informatics and their role in healthcare
• cost big data interoperability

Clinical Decision Support

• Enabling more robust clinical decision support
• Exploring, and successfully implementing alternate delivery methods of care

Interoperability

• Information exchange between hospital and outside groups/providers
• Mobile interoperability of Patient Data
• Interoperability strategies to ensure exchange of quality information
• HIE Connectivity, Direct Trust Testing/Connectivity
• Improved communication between providers

Mobility

• How to get the most out of mobile platforms.
• Role of mobile devices in Health IT.
• Telehealth
• Clinical solutions and patient engagement solutions
• How to be successful with cloud strategies

Cost & Resources

• Ensuring that using IT in care delivery actually helps in reducing cost of healthcare Cutting cost of the contracted services
• Supporting the education efforts of various departments, without having to assume responsibility for conducting the actual education
• Prioritizing to corporate strategic direction.
• Workflow of IT operations area – more efficient
• How to evaluate new technoloty
• global sense of what the most useful cutting edge technologies are
• Resources Money changes in government regulations
• Project management C-suite expectations Talent acquisition
• Money to implement, train, maintain. Trained technical people. Affordable bandwidth.
• Funding; dealing with increasing integration requirements; need for speed in an increasing complicated environment.
• Budgets Finding qualified staff to fill positions GRC culture change to make the business more responsible for their applications
• Change management in general

Innovations

• What start-up technologies are larger institutions potentially looking at?
• What apps should patients be “prescribed”?
• Trends, direction in technologies for new technologies like wearable technology etc.

Security

• System implementation Security
• Authentication, electronic signature
• Medical & Personal Device Security
• Security and Privacy Mobility