UC San Francisco (UCSF) and Cisco are teaming-up to jointly develop an interoperability platform for sharing healthcare information among multiple entities. The platform will be designed to enable health systems, providers and application vendors to share and integrate health data from multiple sources, making pertinent patient information accessible when and where it’s needed for care through a highly secure process.
As part of the deal, a collaborative center at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus will be established where staff from both entities, along with global health technology leaders, will be able to collectively test and scale the interoperability platform across different devices, IT systems and software.
“Fragmentation of information is one of the most challenging impediments in health care today,” said Michael Blum, MD, UCSF associate vice chancellor for Informatics and director of the UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation, which houses this initiative for UCSF. “In human terms, the consequences are enormous: the lack of complete information on our patients leads to poor, costly care, delays in diagnosis or treatment, and dissatisfied patients – all due to health information systems that cannot communicate with one another. In this age of apps, social media, and mobile communications, this status quo is completely unacceptable to both patients and providers. We plan to change all of that with this partnership.”
A platform of this type is critical to enabling health systems to meet the data-exchange and collaboration requirements of the Affordable Care Act.A platform of this type is critical to enabling health systems to meet the data-exchange and collaboration requirements of the Affordable Care Act, according to Aenor Sawyer, MD, a UCSF orthopedist and digital health leader who was instrumental in establishing the partnership. This platform also will enable providers to incorporate new sources of information from outside the clinical system, such as personal health applications, wearable sensors, consumer devices and home monitors, which will be integrated with clinical data to optimize health decisions.
The initiative will leverage industry, healthcare and government relationships, including early industry partners. The platform initially will be piloted for patients at UCSF Medical Center and ultimately extend to other affiliated entities within UCSF Health, including UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and joint ventures with John Muir Health and Hospice by the Bay, among others. It is expected to expand rapidly throughout the UC system and with other health care delivery partners nationwide.
While roughly 94 percent of hospitals and 78 percent of office physicians use certified electronic health records, those records often cannot be accessed by providers in other health systems. As a result, the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology estimates that one in three consumers remains burdened with providing their own health information when seeking care for a medical problem. This gap in health interoperability costs the U.S. economy billions per year.