Merry Christmas to all

To all of the readers of Healthcare Interoperability around the world, here’s wishing you a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Season’s Greetings to all.

The Wrap: Healthcare’s Look Back at 2014

As we look in the rear view mirror back on 2014, the year that was supposed to change our coding and billing systems, we see that ICD-10 dominated the news with it’s postponement in April and CMS’ subsequent new date of October 1st, 2015. Over the last few weeks though, I’ve heard rumors of yet another delay, this time due to the new political climate in Washington, D.C. These rumors are unsubstantiated, so I would keep them as such. I would record it as a risk to the program for those seeking to restart their ICD-10 initiatives.

Healthcare provider and payer organizations were in “shock and awe” (shocked and many people saying “awww”) at the same time, and high number of provider organizations deciding to postpone their programs indefinitely until the new date was announced and many just restarting the programs either late in the year or planning on doing so in the beginning of the new year, 2015.

The mission of provider IT organizations changed. Just as it was in the pre and post-Y2k days, organizations now wanted to get actual intelligence or analytics from the large systems that they had implemented at such great cost. We came full circle and Analytics started coming to the forefront during the year and it matured after all of the interest, talk and presentations  of Big Data, Business Intelligence and Analytics over the last few years. Leveraging actual data for case studies that I know of this year on Population Health Management and better response times in the ED.

In a recent article in Clinical Innovation and Technology, it was reported that ” as of November 2014, 11,478 eligible professionals and 840 hospitals have attested to Meaningful Use Stage 2. In total, 15,481 new EPs and 221 new hospitals have attested in 2014″. The healthcare provider ecosystem was able to move forward despite some inertia at the beginning of the year.

Many organizations also realized that their infrastructure needed to be updated with projects such as XP to Windows 7 migration; something that needed to occur due to the end support in April by Microsoft of their well known Microsoft XP Operating System.

Consumer health devices starting to get mainstream traction with products like Fitbit and Google Glass starting to look at possible mHealth applications for providers in the future.

The vision and ‘utopia’ of an Interoperable Healthcare ecosystem received a major boost with The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology releasing it’s “10-Year Vision to Achieve An Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure” by 2024. This would be a baseline for future infrastructure development across the United States and possibly even a starting point for world leadership in healthcare systems and infrastructure interoperability.

What a year it has been and we have so much yet to come in 2015 and beyond.