Sorry Frank, the AI genie is never going back in the bottle. If history is any guide, you can expect…
Morning Headlines 12/13/23
Oracle shares slide as revenue misses estimates
Oracle’s Q2 results beat earnings expectations but fall short on revenue, with CEO Safra Catz calling Oracle Health, the former Cerner business, “a drag on Oracle growth.”
ONC and The Sequoia Project Designate First TEFCA QHINs
ONC and The Sequoia Project officially recognize KONZA National Network, EHealth Exchange, Epic Nexus, Health Gorilla, and MedAllies as QHINs.
Kaiser Permanente Slashes IT Jobs Across Bay Area
Kaiser Permanente lays off 115 IT employees, 65 of them in Northern California.
Can someone help simply explain what a QHIN does or why we needed to in healthcare or why you would buy it or work with them? Google says, “A QHIN is a HIN that is a U.S. Entity that has completed the QHIN application, onboarding, and designation process and is a party to the Common Agreement countersigned by the RCE.” Which is just word soup to me. ChatGPT was even worse so I’ll spare everyone that.
@confused – The PR version of a QHIN is to create an interoperability floor to exchange health records. ELI5 – You get some patient data, from some EMRs, in a “cost efficient” manner. The model mirrors the national networks of exchanging data via old protocols and formats (IHE and CCDA) and to one day do it via FHIR which in itself creates more problems of data quality. The treatment / purpose of use requirement of the national networks are limiting to other healthcare business types, especially as patient right of access is continually delayed. QHINs open up /accelerate other data exchange business opportunities such as patient access, operations, payment, etc. There are a lot of inherent issues with QHINs and their business models though. QHINs are a work around to the national networks which are a work around to the EHRs being stingy with the data they are willing to exchange unless you build expensive direct integrations with them. With every work around, you get lower quality data, hence the QHINs being considered the floor. It’s a good start but most groups applying for QHINs are doing it for PR / marketing.
Very helpful. So, my radar wasn’t too far off that the progress is largely marketing related/noise at this point. However, it seems the primary benefit of the QHIN is to have a larger array of access rights beyond the current treatment restraints in place today, particularly operations and payment. However, you’ll still have to deal with the cost challenges I suspect, especially if it’s at similar cost ranges to the national networks. I will guess the QHINs still have an order of magnitude (or 2) pricing problem and to really move the needle in interoperability we need significantly cheaper costs per patient per request.
Dear Matt and @confused. I think the simple fact that Feds and largest HINs, EMRs including Epic, Meditech and ECW, even Surescripts spent seven years on TEFCA would make you at least suspect it’s not for marketing and PR? Ignorance is a bliss. But also a disservice to your followers. You can and should be sceptical. But not claiming people spent years for pure marketing. That’s FUD. FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) means you either scared of it or don’t understand it. Read up on tefca and what it is designed to do and what it accomplished on September 12th.
@FUD_Remover – the work towards TEFCA and the policy isn’t PR/marketing, it is hard, laborious, and worth while. I am not diminishing those contributions. The last sentence I made was about some groups applying for QHIN status. Case and point, look at how many organizations should apply vs how many publicly stated their intent to apply vs who actually applied vs who are progressing forward. What is found in the delta gives better insight.