Healthcare

San Antonio, here I come!

DataMotion will be at The Civitas Networks for Health 2022 Annual Conference, a Collaboration with the DirectTrust Summit, in San Antonio, August 21-24. This year’s theme is “Better Together: Health Data Collaboratives and Information Exchange to Advance Health Equity.” DataMotion has been a long-time member of DirectTrust™ and a leading Health Information Service Provider (HISP), and this is my first time attending this show— I couldn’t be more excited!

Data security is table stakes. There are a lot of moving pieces–making sure that clinical data transmission and the overall digital conversation are interoperable with all endpoints, and ensuring compliance requirements, and logging and tracking those transactions. The number one priority used to be transmitting information to the patient securely, which is now a normal occurrence. But is that process easy or efficient? Solutions were developed without considering the end user experience. Users want, and need an intuitive and frictionless experience—which is where DataMotion comes in. We’re excited about how we can leverage our data and learnings to improve health equity–the theme of one of the Monday’s opening sessions.

According to the CDC, “health equity is achieved when every person has the opportunity to ‘attain his or her full health potential’” and no one is ‘disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.’”

No one can attain their full health potential alone. We need all the help with can get. The digital experience is incredibly important in connecting patients and providers; in line with the conference theme, they are indeed “better together.” If this experience is difficult to navigate, then it won’t be embraced. Patients get better outcomes when everyone across the vertical is working in concert; therefore, I’m excited to learn how the industry as a whole, and in particular, payors and providers, plan to build on their interoperability.

Where do Health Information Exchange/Network organizations (HIEs/HINs) fit into advancing health equity? DataMotion has helped many HIEs/HINs gain interoperability by leveraging Direct Secure Messaging as a way to exchange clinical health information. This has included the secure and efficient transmission of transition of care documents to improve patient care and cost. We have worked with a number of payors and providers to improve the overall secure digital communication experience for patients and members. This has been done by empowering the payor, for example, to integrate a secure messaging interface behind a trusted login to prevent the member from having to create a new username and password, and then log in to a third-party portal. One topic I’m excited to discuss is how HIEs can leverage other digital capabilities to help providers deliver even better care and further improve their overall costs.

These thoughts I’ve just shared lead to more questions, especially about what health IT vendors are doing in this space. Are there any interesting or innovative solutions that they have tried, even if not successful? What changes have they seen since 2020? There seems to have been an AI/machine learning boom over the past few years, which begs the question of if vendors are leveraging that data to improve processes and in turn, patient outcomes.  And are they able to do this while still protecting the PHI/PII while in transit and at rest?

I have a ton of questions about so many types of healthcare IT solutions! And honestly, that’s what I’ve missed the most about not having a steady diet of conferences to attend – meeting new people and learning about new technologies.

For over 20 years, DataMotion has been helping to connect the healthcare ecosystem. Whether it be encrypted email, secure document sharing, or Direct Secure Messaging, DataMotion’s trust-no-one design has played an integral part of how payors and providers securely interact with their patients and members. Fast forward to 2022 – 11 years after I started working with the talented folks at DataMotion – I’m excited to see where healthcare has grown, technologically. I would love to have this conversation with you at the conference, so come see the team at Booth 53!

Feel free to schedule some time beforehand to meet: https://meetings.hubspot.com/christiang

Looking forward to seeing you in San Antonio!

Explore More

• Healthcare: A Digital Temperature Check from a First-Time HIMSS Attendee
• Baby’s First HIMSS: Connecting Providers, Payors, and Health IT
• Connecting the Healthcare Ecosystems: Interoperability, Healthcare IT, and HIMSS 2022
• HIMSS 2021 Takeaways: Healthcare, Cybersecurity and Interoperability

In November of 1963, Walt Disney flew over Orlando, at the time seeing only swamps and farmland. He imagined building a theme park where families could visit and spend time together.  His imagination of what could be ultimately became Walt Disney World, arguably the number one family fun theme park in the world!  Appropriately, the theme for this year’s HIMSS Conference in Orlando was “Reimagine Health.” Which is precisely what we do here at DataMotion.

Coming out of the pandemic and looking at the state of secure information exchange and the healthcare interoperability landscape in 2022, it is instructive for us to try to reimagine healthcare in the coming decade.  While some of the themes touched on during the conference are not necessarily new to the conversation, such as virtual health, population health management, and interoperability, the approaches and players are changing rapidly right before our very eyes.

Assessing the current landscape and re-imagining how, and maybe more importantly, where care is delivered, as well as the financing, the underlying technology, and the healthcare workforce behind that care, is the ask presented to our generation. And when it comes to innovating that underlying technology, DataMotion is front and center. We act as a strategic and collaborative partner, providing low-code solutions and expert insights so that organizations across the healthcare vertical can innovate within their own organizations, and better-re-imagine the “how” and “where.”

Last month, I had the pleasure of travelling to Orlando, Florida for the HIMSS ‘22 conference. And HIMSS did not disappoint! I admittedly had high expectations, based on my colleague, Doug Rubino’s takeaways from previous events. That said, I was unprepared for how absolutely massive the venue was, the number of attendees, and the incredible speakers and programs provided. In today’s post to the DataMotion Blog, I’ll share a few takeaways from the event, including some of the amazing strides the healthcare industry has made, where we are now, and where we could be (sooner than we think!).

Tuesday morning (my first full day of HIMSS ‘22) got off to a strong start with Ben Sherwood, former Co-chairman of Disney Media Networks and President of Disney-ABC Television Group, getting our attention by quoting Walt Disney, and advising us to “stop talking, start doing.”

The session concluded on a memorable note as well, with Mr. Sherwood quoting the late film director Mike Nichols, “unlock the secret of every success: only connect.” These words struck a chord with me. Aside from connecting with my peers in the Health Information Technology (Health IT) space, my goal at HIMSS was to learn as much as possible about how DataMotion’s secure messaging platform can help ONLY CONNECT (see what I did there?) payors and providers securely, and how healthcare is leveraging technology to make a real difference in 2022 and beyond.

The lion’s share of my time during day one was educational, and predominantly focused on secure communications and interoperability (e.g. closed-loop messages and asynchronous communications). It quickly became apparent to me that not only were we, as a country, finally adopting technology within healthcare but we’re actually using it to help save lives – further proving Meaningful Use. A few examples that resonated with me:

1. A hospital system in the Virginia/D.C. area was able to cut 2 minutes, 25 seconds off code blue response times. That is an immediate life-saving impact! Leveraging a secure messaging platform, this new workflow interfaces with their Electronic Medical Record system (EMR) and the background logic identifies where the secure message needs to go.
2. The automation of post-operation patient care. Providers are able to read a patient’s medical record outside of the hospital environment, as well as the data that the patient supplies, using an internet connection device (for example, an Apple Watch). The device can trigger an event to the appropriate hospital staff, sending secure messages to alert providers to an abnormal change in the patient’s health. An example of this is the device sending three-plus alerts to the hospital, indicating that the patient is hypertensive.

These technological changes were accurately described as powerful, meaningful, and automated.

Learning about how our nation exchanges electronic protected health information (ePHI) is important to me, and as an accredited Health Information Service Provider (HISP), to DataMotion. It was informative to see how clinical data is handled today, as well as what the future of ePHI exchange looks like. For instance, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) is working on a medical record standardization that will (hopefully) solve interoperability issues in the upcoming years.

Despite the likelihood of no spring training games in Florida this year, I am still looking forward to some warm weather and sunshine during the upcoming HIMSS 2022 conference in Orlando!  As a veteran of the health information technology (HIT) community, I cannot think of a more exciting time to be a part of this industry, or to participate in next week’s conference.

One area that I am particularly interested in discussing and learning more about at HIMSS is public health. Specifically, how through technology and policy we can effectively enable the public health and general healthcare ecosystems to interact with one another.  To add some clarity, the general healthcare ecosystem is what most of us are familiar with and operate in today with respect to the delivery of care (e.g. local healthcare integrated networks, primary care physicians, pharmacies, etc.). Public health data systems are critical sources of actionable information used by federal, state, tribal, and local public health agencies to protect communities against infectious and non-infectious public health threats. A clear gap emanating from the COVID-19 pandemic was the need for greater degrees of interoperability between these two systems.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recognized that the public health IT infrastructure was antiquated and in desperate need of an upgrade. In response, the Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) was launched.  Goals of the DMI include upgrading the public health IT infrastructure, accelerating the collection and analysis of clinical data, and developing a cutting-edge IT workforce.  Through these developments, the DMI fills technology and policy gaps by enabling greater degrees of information sharing, interoperability, data analysis, and detection, with the goal of driving positive patient outcomes, and lifting the overall public health of communities nationwide.

There is much discussion around enabling greater degrees of interoperability between the general healthcare system and the public health system. In other words, how can we improve upon the collection and aggregation of data from providers followed by the requisite analysis and reporting to be followed by the dissemination of actionable data back to the healthcare system and communities?

Electronic Case Reporting (eCR) is one of many use cases describing this data flow between healthcare providers and public health agencies around reportable conditions. eCR is the generation and transmission of case reports from a provider’s electronic health record to a public health agency for evaluation, analysis, and action.  As you would imagine, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of COVID-19 eCRs transmitted between providers and the CDC skyrocketed.  To illustrate this point, in January 2022 at the peak of the Omicron variant, 30,000 COVID-19 eCRs were transmitted through DataMotion to the CDC every HOUR!  Suffice it to say, the importance of a robust, scalable and modernized information technology architecture is vital to ensuring continuity between the public health sector and the general healthcare ecosystem.

In keeping with the baseball theme, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, DataMotion has served as the nation’s catcher’s mitt for receipt of COVID-19 eCRs and their subsequent transmission to the CDC.  In our role as a Health Information Service Provider (or, HISP) DataMotion has facilitated the transmission of COVID-19 data aggregated from public health laboratories and providers across the nation over the DirectTrust Network to the CDC for analysis and reporting.  In 2020, approximately 10% of the nation’s COVID-19 lab results were routed through our HISP to the CDC as part of the nationwide testing efforts.

These are just some of the thoughts that are top of mind for me as I go into HIMSS next week. Whether you are attending in-person or virtually, I welcome the opportunity to meet and discuss where DataMotion has helped to foster greater degrees of interoperability. Please feel free to book some time on my calendar for an onsite or virtual meeting.

Looking forward to seeing you next week!

Explore More

• HIMSS 2021 Takeaways: Healthcare, Cybersecurity and Interoperability
• Healthcare: A Digital Temperature Check from a First-Time HIMSS Attendee
• Directly Speaking: The 2021 DirectTrust™ Summit
• 21^st Century Data Sharing Techniques for Healthcare Delivery Transformation Success

While I’ve been attending trade shows and networking events for over 15 years, next week will mark my first time attending the national HIMSS conference! I’m excited to attend for many reasons, but first and foremost, I’m truly looking forward to discussing how technology can help improve patient outcomes, a major topic since the introduction of Meaningful Use Stage 1 in 2010. Meaningful Use Stage 2 was introduced in 2012, bringing attention to the need for secure and frictionless digitizing of medical records. In addition to the secure transport, this approach also makes it easy to receive those medical records, lending itself to a seamless transition of care and in turn, helping improve patient outcomes. In today’s blog post, I will dive deeper into this topic, speaking to DataMotion’s involvement in making health information exchange and medical record transmission and receipt a smoother, simpler experience while maintaining security and compliance.

As an accredited HISP (Health Information Service Provider), DataMotion is a major player within Meaningful Use Stage 2, providing Direct Secure Messaging and enabling secure, easy exchange for HIEs (Health Information Exchange), providers, and vendors. As defined by DirectTrust™, Direct Secure Messaging is a secure communication transport for clinical information over the open Internet. DirectTrust describes Direct Secure Messaging as having a similar appearance and function to regular email, but the contents are encrypted via digital certificates and PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). Only the sender and intended recipient are able to decrypt and read the message. DirectTrust further explains that Direct Secure Messaging is a widely-deployed and accessible method with which to communicate sensitive, health-related information, promoting interoperability between disparate systems and organizations within the healthcare ecosystem.

With almost three million Direct addresses in use today, focus has shifted from digitizing transitions to creating a smooth, user-friendly experience and improving patient outcomes based on digital data. DataMotion has had a lot of enlightening conversations with public health IT providers that are leveraging data to provide public health agencies with rapid critical insights in their ongoing battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. But it goes beyond just COVID-19. What if we could pinpoint exactly where a viral outbreak started based on testing data alone? One goal is the ability to transmit sensitive health information securely and leverage healthcare standards like ICD-10-CM/PCS Medical Coding to get us the *right* information without compromising PHI (Personal Health Information) or PII (Personal Identifiable Information).

Today, DataMotion’s Direct Secure Messaging securely transmits millions of messages on a monthly basis, including flu and COVID-19 test results, immunization data, and much more. But Direct doesn’t just have to be clinical EHR (Electronic Health Records) communications–there are so many more possibilities. And these possibilities are precisely why I’m so interested in speaking with population health vendors to better understand how they’re serving their communities.

The pandemic quickly accelerated digital transformation for organizations in all industries, particularly the healthcare ecosystem. COVID-19 highlighted the need for touchless, digital communications in healthcare, especially when dealing with PHI and medical records. This has ushered in a wave of process evaluation and change. Call centers have found that they need to empower their agents to securely communicate with members in a way that’s seamless for both the agent and the member. Another challenge was faxing. Faxing medical records quickly became more difficult during the pandemic, thanks to an almost-exponential influx of patients, increased communications with policy holders, and a virtual army of field nurses working remotely without a home base of operations.

DataMotion is at the forefront of helping health insurance payors communicate seamlessly and securely with their members through secure, natural, familiar ways of communication. Digital communications via chat, email, and document sharing applications have become rapidly normalized, and will continue to expand in the coming years. I’m excited to hear how organizations are integrating these functions into day-to-day applications and systems, and hope to discuss further at HIMSS.

With this being my first HIMSS conference, I’m equally excited to speak with new, emerging health IT vendors, as well as established players in the space. We’re all working together to achieve the common goal of improving patient outcomes through faster and smoother exchange of secure digital communications and health records. I gladly invite anyone to schedule some time to speak with me at the show – you never know what either of us will learn!

Additional Reading and Resources

• DirectTrust Q4 2021 Metrics
• Meaningful Use Stage 1 Requirements Overview
• Eligible Professionals Guide to: Stage 2 of the EHR Incentive Programs
• What Exactly is a HISP?

Despite COVID-19 and its variants still looming large in our daily lives, vaccines and other preventative measures have allowed many workplaces to return to some semblance of normalcy. As part of their reopening efforts (whether a hybrid or full return) businesses are implementing their own COVID-19 vaccination and/or testing requirements, similar to city, state and federal mandates. The goal of doing so is twofold. First, employers want to support a healthy environment as they seek to conduct business in the physical workplace. Second, they must be prepared to meet outside mandates if/when they become required.

Understanding the necessary elements for a safe return is only the first step. Executing a self-enforced vaccine directive while staying compliant with related, long-existing federal mandates (think HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, etc.) is the real challenge.

DataMotion recognized this and quickly pivoted to create a solution. Using our existing secure message delivery API, our engineers developed the VxRM platform to make the collection of employees’ COVID-19 vaccination status and test result data efficient and easy, while helping organizations report on regulatory compliance.

DataMotion’s VxRM platform is designed to help organizations securely, compliantly, and efficiently collect employee COVID-19 data including vaccination records, exemption requests, and test results. Once submitted, these responses are encrypted during transit over a secure channel and stored in a zero-trust, governed database. With this scalable and secure database hosting the personal health information, admins can quickly search and sort through employee responses, then filter and report on the information provided. These security measures help ensure your organization meets government compliance regulations while your data is in transit and in storage on the VxRM platform.

The VxRM platform consists of two corresponding parts: the employee app and the administrator dashboard. In the employee-facing application, employees will provide vaccination records or test result data. Once submitted, this information can then be reviewed, reported upon and monitored within the admin dashboard. We’ll speak a little more to each element below.

The employee side of VxRM consists of a mobile-friendly web application. Employees can access the app once they receive an email (which is sent through the administrator dashboard) containing a link to the employee application.

Within the application, employees can report a vaccine dose, report a COVID-19 test, or request an exemption. Depending on which action is selected, users will be prompted to provide additional information such as a vaccine date or test type. They can upload images of their vaccine record as well.

The administrator dashboard can be found on the DataMotion portal. This is where admins can configure their company settings, add or upload the list of employees required to provide their vaccination status, and even cobrand the employee app. Once employees submit their responses, the administrator dashboard can be used to quickly search and sort through the submitted data as well as report and analyze their company’s general COVID-19 vaccination status. These reports and analyses can then be exported into a CSV and passed along to meet regulatory compliance.

The DataMotion team designed the VxRM platform to be agile and adaptable to your organization’s unique needs. For instance, you may want your employees to be tested on a weekly, rather than bi-weekly, basis. This is configurable with the admin dashboard, allowing flexibility for organizations to customize their unique requirements and ensure company policies are being enforced.

As we move forward, new requirements and options are expected. For example, booster shots may be required in the coming months for people to be considered fully vaccinated by the CDC. As new medicines are developed, companies may want to examine how those with positive COVID-19 test results are treating their illness in order to determine the length of time before an employee can return to work. With these possibilities in mind, the VxRM platform’s flexible and agile design will allow us to quickly update and add new features as mandates and requirements continue to change.

Normalcy, or something similar, comes with a price. To accommodate a return to the office in a safe and compliant manner, companies across industries are moving forward with vaccination requirements of their own. As they do so, the DataMotion VxRM platform will ensure that organizational and/or government mandates are compliantly fulfilled while avoiding logistical slow-downs.

To sum up, the VxRM Platform:

• Contains an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, cobranded web application where employees can quickly upload their vaccination status and test results.
• Securely collects and stores sensitive PII and PHI data, helping your organization stay within regulatory compliance.
• Allows administrators to easily search and sort through as well as report on submitted responses to ensure your employees can safely come to the office.

In our next post, we will review the ins and outs of the VxRM platform and give a functionality overview. For further information, we invite you to visit our VxRM site or review our Employee Guide for Using the DataMotion VxRM and Admin Guide to Configuring the VxRM Application for more information and step-by-step guidance on successfully utilizing our platform. If you have any additional questions, stop by our documentations page or contact our sales team today.

Team DataMotion recently attended the 2021 HIMSS (Health Information Management Systems Society) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 9^th-13^th. While we did not host a booth this year, some of our team represented our company as attendees, and we wanted to hear about their experience. We sat down with Doug Rubino, Business Development Director, Healthcare to discuss the overall event, Doug’s takeaways, and what is in store for the industry.

Q: Doug, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Could you give us a sense of some of the overall discussion topics at the conference?

Doug Rubino: I had the opportunity to speak with quite a few attendees and in general, there were some interesting conversations. One of the more-discussed topics was the weather—it was HOT in Vegas! Other points of general discussion were, as you can imagine, COVID-19, the delta variant, and the impact on this year’s event. But industry-wise, some of the more common discussion themes throughout the week focused on telehealth, remote patient monitoring, population health and care management in areas pertaining to at-risk communities, and public health. There was also much discussion around the use of artificial intelligence within healthcare.

Q: Could you tell us a little about some of the challenges that organizations are facing?

DR: One challenge is the enablement of public health organizations and other community-based organizations to securely exchange PHI and other sensitive clinical information amongst stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem. These stakeholders include health systems, health plans, and other ancillary provider organizations, among others. Community-based organizations, which exist to support those most at risk in our society, often do not have the technology in place to support interoperability.  Finally, from a business standpoint, there is a real lack of business-related processes and internal workflows to support initiatives such as closed-loop referrals.

Q: Were there any challenges cited that were specific to cybersecurity?

DR: Yes, indeed. Based on my conversations and from what I heard at the sessions, many (if not all) healthcare organizations seem to be operating at an increased level of awareness regarding cybersecurity threats to their infrastructure. This concern also extends to ransomware attacks, especially in light of some of the recent news stories.

Another security-related challenge that came up at HIMSS 2021 was the common issue around legacy systems. In addition to the outdated hardware and software, many organizations have a marked lack of internal expertise and knowledge of internal network schematics and topology. This, essentially, boils down to a general failure to understand where system vulnerabilities exist, which ultimately leads to the inability to anticipate and identify cybersecurity threats, and to prevent an attack.

To mitigate the risks of cybersecurity threats across a healthcare organization, it’s essential to fortify vulnerable endpoints. Here at DataMotion, our library of APIs is intended to do just that, ensuring a seamless flow of sensitive data into and out of an organization to ensure its privacy and confidentiality. We operate through verifiable compliance, multi-cloud design and low-code technology, making it easy to integrate into a workflow while adding an extra layer of security.

Q: From challenge springs innovation. What kind of new ideas are making their way into the space?

DR: There are some exciting new concepts and developments in this area! To name a few, the use of artificial intelligence for patient flow and medical coding, ambient clinical intelligence, the automation of clinical documentation, and some of the advances being made with respect to prior authorizations.

Q: We saw your event agenda, and it was packed with some interesting-sounding sessions! Could you tell us a little about one of the sessions, and some of your key takeaways?

DR: During “Keynote: Healthcare Cybersecurity Resilience in the Face of Adversity” the speaker had a great point when discussing cybersecurity. He stated that too many organizations do not have a complete picture of how their information systems are connected. In order to effectively secure an environment, an organization must have a complete picture of its network schematic across the entire enterprise to properly secure all endpoints. This really spoke to what we do at DataMotion, making these connections to keep data and documents secure, and how increasingly important services like ours are to the healthcare ecosystem.

Q: What were some of the other, overall topics and what developments do you see coming in those areas?

DR: In general, there was a lot of discussion around social determinants of health and incorporating public health into the general healthcare ecosystem. I anticipate there will be an increased focus on enabling the interoperability of organizations operating in and servicing the public health space. For example, linking community-based organizations to the greater healthcare ecosystem.

Q: Doug, thanks for your time and sharing your takeaways from HIMSS 2021. It sounds like this was a productive event!

DR: It really was! HIMSS is an outstanding, informative conference, and it always gives a great sense of what is coming down the road for the industry. I’m looking forward to HIMSS ‘22!

Explore More

Directly Speaking: The 2021 DirectTrust™ Summit

21^st Century Data Sharing Techniques for Healthcare Delivery Transformation Success

HIPAA Compliance in the Age of Population Health Management