“I feel like I'm in a new marriage and we haven't really dated that much in the past but now I have to engage with them.” Gavin Krumenacker was quoting someone he met at a healthcare management event because the comment sums up the way many HIT managers feel these days.

Closing the gap on health care management systems is the major job facing HIT and the vendor community, says Krumenacker, vice president of strategy and business development at health information exchange specialist MRO.

“It's a last mile of telephone connectivity sort of thing,” he says. “We've got systems in place, but how do we start to derive value out of that? It's crossing that chasm from implementation to realization.”

As the telecommunications companies have found out, bridging the last mile is difficult and time-consuming. Typically it requires new strategies and new sets of tools. It also involves people in the process to a much greater degree, requiring closer cooperation and interaction.

Among the solutions MRO plans to demonstrate at HIMSS15 will be tools for release of information (ROI), payer audit compliance and tracking, and accounting of disclosures. MRO also offers services and applications that support meaningful use attestation and health information exchange – wares that can be used as a common platform across a healthcare enterprise to standardize disclosure policies and drive system-wide security and compliance.

The problem, Krumenacker says, is not solutions, but actual interoperability. The products have been developed for the most part, now it’s a matter of fitting them together with existing systems and making everything work smoothly.

And that also requires getting the people in the organization working together in new ways.

“For any business it creates opportunities and challenges,” Krumenacker adds. “People have a lot on their plates. Getting them to say ‘yes’ to doing something is taking a little bit longer.”