What We Do

 

 

Why a consortium now?

The delivery of high-quality, efficient healthcare remains a significant challenge across the globe. Healthcare has yet to experience the kind of interoperability that has already fueled innovation and disruption in other industries. Despite the progress that has been made to improve health outcomes, a lack of interoperable data formats, incomplete information exchange across the continuum of care, and business governance that inhibits data interoperability all diminish the ability to more widely impact better outcomes, stifling increased innovation in the healthcare marketplace.

HIMSS, HL7 International and IHE International together believe an entity like the Global Consortium for eHealth Interoperability can activate digital health efficiency and innovation on the ground by deploying validated, scalable, data-sharing technologies and processes to support best practices at the point of care and beyond. The consortium will act as a coordinating point for the global healthcare community to help accelerate the adoption of next-generation, API-based standards to support increased interoperability around the world.

• Create a trusted environment. It will offer a way to convene a diverse set of stakeholders to share lessons learned from failures, best practices learned from successes, adoption metrics that drive action on the ground, and guidance to inform standards-based health IT interoperability product development. It will share its findings publicly with the broader community to help support healthcare interoperability implementers globally, and it will encourage its participants to do the same.
• Share actionable knowledge. It will provide a venue to convene key actors from across the care continuum to efficiently share use cases and implementation guide development among different participants. Input sessions will be held throughout the year at the HIMSS Global Health Conference and other broadly attended, regional healthcare and health information and technology events to share ways to support internal roadmaps and manage interoperability strategy planning.
• Drive continuous improvement. It will support its participants by creating a space for them to share their test plans and validated use cases, implementation guides and best practices to further educate developers, as well as provide interoperability testing services for market suppliers to assess, test and explore new opportunities that apply to current and emerging health IT. The consortium will enhance health systems’ and clinicians’ own real-world interoperability testing initiatives through testing tool guidance and live event participation like connectathons.
• Accelerate progress. It will share practical, real-world testing tools and practices from across the globe with its participants and the wider community to accelerate the deployment of key use cases and implementation guides at the point of care. Participants will develop use cases, support the recruitment of testing partners, coordinate meetings and events, and ensure timely global feedback into the standards development process to inform and update organizational roadmaps, drive strategic decisions and help efficiently allocate resources to accelerate standards-based information exchange development.