Happy National HIT week! To celebrate, we attended the New England HIMSS Health IT Advocacy & Health Information Exchange Conference: A full-day educational and networking event to discuss and learn about emerging technologies in Health Information Exchange and their impact on care coordination and policy.  To spread the health IT cheer, we summarized the event in a series of tweets:

#Newenglandhimss #NHITweek Laurance Stuntz Dir of MeHI starts us off today with MA Digital Health Initiative – Progress and Future. pic.twitter.com/7sSR20fOHL

— Pat Rioux (@pat_rioux) October 5, 2017

Next up, Allan Hackney, HIT Officer for the Office of the Lt. Governor of Connecticut, spoke about “Restarting the HIT Journey in Connecticut.” He challenged the crowd to guess Connecticut’s boarder states. Can you guess them?

CT border states include New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts….and Florida. @athackney #NHITweek #NewEnglandHIMSS

— New England HIMSS (@NewEnglandHIMSS) October 5, 2017

Connecticut's #HIE work: work that comes out of the design groups becomes the strategy via @athackney #NHITweek #NewEnglandHIMSS pic.twitter.com/kdqFTw79F8

— New England HIMSS (@NewEnglandHIMSS) October 5, 2017

We got a HIMSS National Update from Robert Havasy, Sr. Director, HIS, HIMSS. He drove the point that information blocking has made EHRs a symbol of physician administrative burden. ONC’s next step is ensuring the EHRs in place work efficiently for providers and allow the interoperable exchange of health information.

21st Century Cures: #interoperability means use of #eHealth info w/o special effort by the user. @rob_havasy #NHITweek #NewEnglandHIMSS

— New England HIMSS (@NewEnglandHIMSS) October 5, 2017

.@HIMSS goal "to drive value for your organizations out of the investments you've already made" says @rob_havasy #Newenglandhimss #NHITWeek

— Galen Healthcare (@GalenHealthcare) October 5, 2017

After lunch, we had an engaging presentation from Jitin Asnaani, Executive Director for the CommonWell Health Alliance. He spoke of designing a tool aimed to empower both the caregiver and individual. To enable this reality, they built a person-centered, scalable network. CommonWell’s Vision: “Health data should be available to individuals and providers regardless of where care occurs; and that provider access to this data must be built-in to HIT at a reasonable cost for use by a braod range of health care providers and the people they serve.”

.@jitin of @CommonWell talks making #health #data available to all regardless of where care occurs #NewEnglandHIMSS #NHITWeek pic.twitter.com/wwqoRPbYnV

— Galen Healthcare (@GalenHealthcare) October 5, 2017

Build the network around the patient. Start with person in the center. @jitin @CommonWell #Newenglandhimss #NHITweek pic.twitter.com/bXYcC235cr

— New England HIMSS (@NewEnglandHIMSS) October 5, 2017

Next we checked out SMART, an app platform for healthcare, created by Boston Children’s Computational Health Informatics Program, and presented by Project Manager, Alyssa White. SMART Health IT is an open, standards based technology platform that enables innovators to create apps that seamlessly and securely run across the healthcare system.  Try playing around with the platform here!

Try #healthcare apps out with @SMARTHealthIT to find what's right for your org #Create & #Innovate #NHITweek #NewEnglandHIMSS pic.twitter.com/2yGBuOas8N

— Galen Healthcare (@GalenHealthcare) October 5, 2017

Guest appearance by The Walking Gallery!

Our own @pat_rioux rocking her #thewalkinggallery jacket. @ReginaHolliday #NHITWEEK #NewEnglandHIMSS pic.twitter.com/ohKFF5L4ih

— New England HIMSS (@NewEnglandHIMSS) October 5, 2017

The last presentation of the day was an interoperability panel focused on demonstrating emerging technologies in the space. The panel was moderated by Shaun Alfreds, COO at HealthInfoNet, and made up of Scott Afzal, Partner at Audacious Inquiry, Jay Desai, CEO & Co-Founder of Patient-Ping, and Chris Klomp, CEO at Collective Medical Technologies. The over arching theme was on continually finding innovative way to deliver value to customers, not just solely delivering data. How can we make healthcare better connected? We can have productive competition without information blocking.

#DataBlocking: "We should get paid when we deliver value against that data, not for the data itself" Chris Klomp #NewEnglandHIMSS #NHITWeek pic.twitter.com/isQI6WDZH0

— Galen Healthcare (@GalenHealthcare) October 5, 2017

"You have to keep delivering value to earn your network." @jdesai01 #NewEnglandHIMSS

— PatientPing (@PatientPing) October 5, 2017

Closing remarks were made by President-Elect, New England HIMSS Director, and Application Services at Emerson Hospital, Timothy Wong, before the conference wrapped up. Thank you New England HIMSS for the captivating & extremely valuable conference!

Thanks to all of our #NewEnglandHIMSS Board Members who helped make our #NHITweek #HIE & Advocacy Day a success! pic.twitter.com/k5bcytYMRQ

— New England HIMSS (@NewEnglandHIMSS) October 5, 2017

For future New England HIMSS Events, check out their website! If you’re interested in how you can make your organization more interoperable,  visit our website, or contact us below: