On Sunday, February 19 at a HIMSS17 pre-conference event, IHIE’s President and CEO, John Kansky, joined Brandon Neiswender of Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP) and Charles Scaglione of Bronx RHIO to address the issue of HIE sustainability and to discuss several emerging services of HIE organizations.

The session, “Emerging Services among Health Information Exchange Networks: Towards Sustainability,” was moderated by John Rancourt, Deputy Director, Office of Care Transformation (OCT) of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).

On the issue of sustainability, Kansky replied, “It’s hard work. I feel like any business that can generate value and has the opportunity to create new value should have any problems sustaining itself as a business. With the healthcare system as fragmented as it is, there is no shortage of things that HIEs can do to add value.

Here are the emerging and innovative services at each of these regional HIE organizations.

Brandon Neiswender, Vice President and COO, CRISP

Neiswender highlighted CRISP’s care alerts registry, “a by-product of our work on notification services,” he said. “We need a small, lightweight platform to store things to notify people to take action, such as ‘Is the patient in a care management program? Who is the care manager and what is their phone number? Has the patient had a discharge from hospital in past 30 days? These can be small little flags embedded in the patient care overview and available in the query portal, and also available in an API platform.”

Charles Scagline, CEO and Executive Director, Bronx RHIO

“Analytics been a cool service in terms of getting to another level of detail and focusing on their business needs,” Scaglione with Bronx RHIO said. However, on a more basic level, he said, the functionalities having the greatest impact on HIE usage are single sign on and data availability alerts.

John Kansky, President and CEO, Indiana Health Information Exchange

“We talk a lot about home runs and base hits,” Kansky said. “In our 10-plus year history, we are figuring out what our market wants and needs and will pay for. We need to get away from just wanting to hit home runs. Something that’s talked about in the tech start-up world, and less in the HIE world, is “fail fast,”— if you try to hit a home run and you bet so much resources and two years of development on this huge thing and screw that up, that’s an existential threat. If you do incrementalism, add small value, and figure out which pieces work and not work quickly. And, it needs to be okay to fail. With more things coming into the marketplace to add value, it’s okay to have some failures.”

Read Healthcare Informatics’ full account of this panel by Heather Landi HERE.