Celebrating Innovation and Gathering Inspiration at the Rocky Mountain Health IT Summit

Earlier this month, healthcare leaders from Colorado and other states gathered for two days of updates, inspiration and celebration around our innovative state's healthcare improvements.

The Rocky Mountain Health IT Summit from Healthcare Innovation Group earlier this month kicked off with a keynote by Rachel Dixon, Executive Director, Prime Health Colorado, and Carrie Paykoc, Interim Director, Office of eHealth Innovation.

In “Colorado – Leading the Nation in Health Innovation” Dixon and Paykoc described how Colorado was one of the first states in the nation to have a Health IT Roadmap. “We have an exciting mix of policy, technology, innovation and collaboration in Colorado,” said Paykoc.

Dixon of Prime Health, a healthcare thinktank that has grown to now nearly 5,000 members, described the ways the healthcare community in Colorado collaborates to “create better information systems that make us smarter and help us take better care of patients. We have a multistakeholder, multisystem approach to solving problems that helps us unstick some of these old sticky problems in healthcare,” she said.

Next up was “How Colorado is Redefining Interoperability” – a panel moderated by Mark Haglund, Editor of Healthcare Innovation. The panel members included Ray Deiotte, Chief Data Officer for Centura Health, Morgan Honea, Chief Executive Officer for CORHIO, Jay Nakashima, Executive Director for eHealth Exchange and Lorri Phipps, CEO and President of Mainstreet Pediatrics.

Proposed Trusted Exchange Framework Common Agreement (TEFCA) regulations were a topic discussed by the panel. Morgan Honea, CORHIO CEO said “We are taking TEFCA very seriously – it’s a matter of figuring out where we fit.”

The panel acknowledged that “interoperability” means different things to different people and organizations. But in the end, it needs to be about patient care. How to get the right information at the right time into the clinician’s natural workflow. Whether the data is pushed to clinicians or they pull it at the point of care, the data needs to be curated, trusted and usable.

“If you’re going to trust data from outside your walls, it has to be there when you need it -- it has to be right,” said Honea.

Deiotte from Centura called for an end to fax machines and image PDFs – and “putting the control into the patient’s hands so no matter where they go, their data is in their control.”