ORLANDO – When asked if the company has an overarching theme as it prepares to open its booth at HIMSS24 on Tuesday, Kathleen Eller, InterSystems’ head of global healthcare market strategy, had a simple answer. Presents: “Health data and interoperability, and stuff. It makes it possible.”
This goal – simple to articulate but extremely complex to achieve – will be familiar to anyone who has watched the company and all the work it has done for more than 40 years in the healthcare ecosystem. To connect organizations from all corners.
“Interoperability is and always has been our foundation,” Eller said. “We do interoperability at scale.”
And for all the work that has been done over the past four decades to lay the foundation for seamless, right-data-right-time-right-people information exchange, those efforts are even more important now. More than ever
“As you look at where the industry is going, where you look at artificial intelligence, if the data isn’t ready, if it’s not comprehensive, you can’t do AI,” he said. “You need the technology to manage that. And we have that technology. You need to build AI solutions and incorporate them into healthcare applications. And we’re doing that.”
In addition to supporting AI initiatives, InterSystems has several other key priorities that it plans to highlight at HIMSS24.
Chief among them: the interoperability mandate increases for health plans, with CMS rules requiring application programming interfaces to exchange payer data.
“It’s a huge problem in America,” Eller said. “The APIs are one piece of that. But the APIs are the easy part. There’s a longitudinal record of what the mandate assumes is going to be there. And I’m sure it’s important to stage that whole process and move forward. It’s going to have to happen. People are consistent with the rules that they have — the operational changes that they need in 2026 and then the API implementation in 2027, and then continue to add to that.”
InterSystems will also highlight its innovative work with a wide variety of healthcare organizations, said Eller, who notes that its platform is “built by Epic, built by VA , made by 3M.”
It also has “a lot of young companies, many of which will be featured in our booth,” he said, “and we encourage people to come and meet them.”
One of them has developed a device that fits over your tooth and monitors your health through your saliva. Another is using technology to match patients to trials and allow patients to choose to share their data and enter a clinical trial network. “We have someone else looking at genomics.”
VA will showcase some of their own interoperability use cases with InterSystems, as will the eHealth Exchange, “what they’re doing at QHIN and what they’ve done to prove FHIR use cases at the national level. Tells a lot about it.”
As always, InterSystems will be an important part of the Trusted Interoperability Showcase. “We’re part of HL7’s year-long participation in the DaVinci Project — designed to promote the expansion of FHIR across the industry,” said Michael Marchant of UC Davis and InterSystems and HL7 in a presentation. There will be a joint presentation between Russ Leftwich. Keegan from Jocelyn Point of Care Partners, who manages the da Vinci project, will also be at our booth.”
Outside the booth, InterSystems is showcasing several educational sessions, including one, “GenAI’s Got Talent – Can It Save Healthcare?” Which was previewed here.
Another event, moderated by Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, focused on “talking about digital health innovation beyond AI.” As part of the panel, Metadata Solutions, a clinical research organization, will showcase what it is doing to “source real-world evidence electronically,” and 3M Health “will I’ll be talking about what they’re doing, and Jane will be kind of pulling it together within a digital health framework.”
A third major session – it’s invitation-only, but invitations are requested – is a luncheon focused on paying attendees, with a focus on “health plan innovation and health planning,” Eller said. Regulation as a Catalyst for Strategy” is around. It will include MVP Health’s Chief Strategy Officer Dominic Bezzaro (and former managing director of Intersystem HealthShare).
“He’ll talk about an agile approach to strategic planning that informs what the feds and state regulators are doing and how to incorporate that into your overall approach to regulation. Don’t make it a case of, ‘I have to check this box,’ but plan long-term so you can achieve compliance but also achieve your long-term goals,” Eller explained.
As for new products and announcements, InterSystems has several.
“We just released our Intersystems Payer Solutions on our website, ready to address the new interoperability and prior authorization mandates.
“And we’ll talk about our National Gateway Service, which is kind of a connection to connect to QHINs or Carequality or CommonWell through a kind of one-stop shop.”
It will also highlight its research data pipeline, an FHIR-based feed for OMOP research data models.
Mostly, Eller says she’s just looking forward to the interactions she’ll have with customers, clients and other HIMSS24 attendees.
“One of the challenges of being InterSystems is that we’re broad, so we serve people who are developing solutions, who are providing maintenance, who are paying for maintenance. One of the conversations we’ll be having is crowdsourcing feedback around genAI and where it’s going and where people see the best use of genAI.
“We have a survey that we’re running at some of the other programs, and we’re going to run it at HIMSS — we encourage people to come and give their feedback,” she added.
“One of the data points that we’ve seen come up very strongly is that when we ask people what they see as the biggest risk from general AI, it’s the release of patient data into the public domain. The problem is, either non-consensual or involuntary, or both.
“When we looked at the survey of about 134 respondents, we found that 45 percent of them expressed that as their biggest concern. So that’s going to be one of the things I talk to people about. I’d be interested in how do we mitigate that? What does that mean? We have to think from a product perspective, from a governance perspective, where do we go with this? How does that inform our future?”
InterSystems is in booth #1361 at HIMSS24.