About 15 years ago, Rasu Shrestha, MD, realized that in order to make a bigger difference in the lives of patients, he would have to go where the action was.

He was a practicing radiologist when he realized – during a fellowship – the huge promise of informatics. Today, Shrestha serves as chief innovation officer at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and also president of the 200-member UPMC Technology Development Center.

"As a clinician, you maybe touch one patient at a time," he says, "but when you're doing the things that I'm fortunate enough to be part of the team that's doing, you have the potential to touch hundreds if not thousands and more patients at a time."

On April 16 at HIMSS15, Shrestha and Ranga Chandra Gudivada, manager for Enterprise Vocabulary Services at UPMC, will present Beyond the Hype: Achieving True Semantic Interoperability.

Shrestha describes the session as partly technical and partly strategic – and certainly beyond the hype that sometimes attends the topic of interoperability.

"What this session is about is really getting underneath to the essence of what true interoperability actually means," he said. "It's honing in on something we've actually achieved at UPMC, which we think is fundamental to achieving true interoperability for healthcare."

As Shrestha sees it, the fundamental challenge with interoperability remains that in the last decade or more, the industry – even UPMC – has been proliferating silos.

"The point that I'm trying to make with the presentation is it's one thing to have these silos, but it's another thing to then break down these silos by aggregating data across the board. How do you go from data to information, and from information to meaning? Where we are right now as an industry, we're at the data level. We're locked. The data is locked in multiple silos."

Shrestha and Gudivada will discuss how UPMC has managed to unlock the data with a platform they've named Fluence – and as Healthcare IT News previously reported UPMC will launch a commercial version of at HIMSS15.

Shrestha describes Fluence as an overlay layer. It sits on top the silos that have been created through the years, including EMRs and other clinical information systems.

The session focuses on three different aspects of building a semantic interoperability platform: terminologies and vocabularies; processes, tools and technologies; and UPMC’s efforts to reach 100 percent semantic mapping of various clinical elements.

Beyond the Hype: Achieving True Semantic Interoperability runs from noon to 1 p.m. in Room W196C.

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