Partnership Driving Health Data Conversion and Interoperability with Colin Banas DrFirst and James Hammer Harmony Healthcare IT

Empowered Patient Podcast

James Hammer, the Senior VP at Harmony Healthcare IT and Dr. Colin Banas, the Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst join me to discuss their recent partnership to accelerate the transition of care providers and payers to a digital environment. Faced with clinician burnout, organizations are even more pressed to find efficient methods to treat patients and reduce the need to struggle with outdated information systems and data silos.

Jim explains, "The farther back or historical, the older legacy applications are, the less the data is actually what's called discreet or codified. And today's EHRs, obviously require codified data to alert triggers and have to be codified to be able to interact and be interoperable with other systems. What's exciting about this relationship between DrFirst and us is they've got years of technology and the ability to look at medications, for example. And, to take literally descriptive text and convert that into codified data, meaning translate that to an NDC code, or a drug name, as well as a CIG that's required for interoperable and usable data in the EHR."

Colin elaborates, "Anytime you have the clinical team re-input data, it's tedious, but it also can introduce errors. I've been in informatics for over two decades now, and we've been talking about interoperability since the onset. I do think we've gotten a lot better, especially with solutions like Harmony's, but I still think that we have a way to go. Particularly, I would refer to semantic interoperability, which is what Jim was referring to. This is when the data not only moves from point A to B, but it arrives at endpoint B in the format that system is expecting and can be used immediately without that manual intervention that is so tedious."

@DrFirst #Healthit #Interoperability #ValueBasedCare #EHR #ClinicianBurnout #PatientOutcomes

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Download the transcript here