The Nashville-based Center for Medical Interoperability launched a testing program to evaluate the interoperability of the health care industry's connected technology platforms.

WHY IT MATTERS
The C4MI Verified program is designed in part around recommendations made by the National Academy of Medicine and will be conducted through partnerships with medical device vendors and its member health care organizations.

The Center has created a trust platform architecture, which will be combined with supporting specifications to accelerate the development of interoperable medical devices and systems.

The first C4MI Verified program to launch will be the Patient Vitals Program, though the Center noted more programs are planned in other areas such as ventilators.

In addition, data will be usable by clinicians to improve treatment and outcomes, with the aim of improving data quality through semantic and syntactic conformance to Center's specification requirements.

The program will verify security and provisioning capabilities, with additional goals to improve the mapping of patient vital sign data from multiple device vendors into core electronic health records and other IT systems.

THE LARGER TREND
The success of the wide-ranging digitization efforts currently underway across the healthcare industry will largely depend on the ability to share information across time and space from multiple devices, sources, systems, and organizations.

While health care has made progress in recent years with the proliferation of EHRs, establishment of regional health information exchanges, and development of data exchange standards and interfaces, interoperability among health care technologies remains very limited.

As of 2016, 96 percent of hospitals and 78 percent of physicians' offices were using EHRs, according to the National Academy of Medicine, but a lack of interoperability, exacerbated by the avalanche of data collected from multiple sources, devices, and organizations across the care continuum, continued to hinder the flow of information.

Just this week, a Deloitte survey of 70 payers and providers indicated health organizations believe they will have to go beyond what their IT vendors currently provide in order to achieve the level of interoperability envisioned by upcoming federal regulations.

An August survey of healthcare tech leaders, conducted by Center for Connected Medicine and HIMSS Media, found the most crucial elements needed to drive interoperability in healthcare are commitment by senior leadership, financial incentives or penalties that encourage organizations to share data with one another and with individual patients, and advances in tools and technologies.

ON THE RECORD
"The program will enable healthcare organizations to have confidence that the solutions they purchase will be interoperable," Dean Harrison, chairman of the Center's board, and president and CEO of Northwestern Memorial Healthcare, said in a statement. "Both buyers and suppliers of healthcare technology stand to benefit when the marketplace shifts to support products and solutions that better serve the needs of patients and providers."

Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.