Learn how to operationalize new health IT wisdom at HealthIMPACT Midwest in Chicago on September 8

Our vision of providing a series of packed one day events focused on practical, relevant, and actionable health IT advice were very well received in Houston, NYC, and Santa Monica earlier this year. Our next event is in Chicago and we’re going to continue to eschew canned PowerPoint decks which limit conversations and instead deliver on the implications of major trends and operationalizable advice about where to successfully apply IT in healthcare settings. As usual, the blind promotion of tech hype is going to be replaced with and actionable insights that can be put to immediate use. Based on some of the feedback we got from the 3 earlier events this year, it looks like we struck a chord:

“IMN have brought together a one-of-a-kind venue for the HealthIMPACT forum. It offers an opportunity to explore, in-depth, the intersection of emerging models of cloud computing with solving some of our toughest problems in health information technology. It’s a great opportunity to meet national thought leaders and explore these issues at depth in an intimate setting. ” – Keith Toussaint, Executive Director, Business Development, Global Business Solutions, MAYO CLINIC

“You had a pretty engaged group yesterday. I would think you regard the meeting as successful; it was in a beautiful venue. ” – David S. Mendelson, MD, FACR, Co-Chair Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, Professor of Radiology, Director of Radiology Information Systems Pulmonary Radiology, Senior Associate, Clinical Informatics, MOUNT SINAI MEDICAL CENTER

“[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

“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

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

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

Based on the feedback from the Houston, NYC, and Santa Monica events and what we’ve heard from our surveys, below are some of the topics we plan to cover in Chicago on September 8th at HealthIMPACT Midwest.

• Reckoning with the Challenges of Meaningful Use Stage 2
• Fear and loathing as well as excitement around new risk-based collaborative payment systems and value based reimbursement
• Cutting through the Health IT Hype Cycle – The Top Five Things That Matter When You are Running a Health System
• Using Mobile Applications to Align Caregiver Behavior to Enterprise Initiatives While Improving Patient Satisfaction and Outcomes
• Doing More with Less – Clinical and Financial Integration Required to Deliver True Population Based Health Management for a Value-Based Reimbursement Environment
• Interoperability and Coordination of Care across Multiple Providers – Realizing the Value of Health Information Exchange
• Working With Tech Providers to Build and Implement Technology That Works for Your Physicians, Nurses, and Patients
• A Look to the Future of Clinical Decision Support and Analytics
• Using Advanced Analytics to Improve the Patient Experience for your Community
• Creating the IT Integration Playbook for Success During Mergers and Expansions
• What You Can Do to Protect Your Organization as You Become More Dependent on Cloud Based Services
• Innovation Shark Tank – The Questions You Need to Ask and the Questions Vendors Need to be Ready For

All of the prepared agenda items above will be delivered in a unique and novel way so that the audience can drive the direction of the conversation. At HealthIMPACT we ask our audience to keep us honest, and they do. Some of the other topics that will be woven throughout the day include:

Data integration and system 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

Population Health and 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

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

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

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