Tag: Nick Knowlton

Q. Where do you see the future of interoperability?   A. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of interoperability in health care. With the sudden increase in telehealth appointments and remote patient monitoring, health care professionals who were or could quickly become interoperable were able to quickly adapt because they could exchange patient data seamlessly between different EHR systems. As a result, impact to patient care was minimized during a time of great strain.  Looking...

Q. How does interoperability impact clinician or provider satisfaction? A. Interoperability, by definition, is the ability of different information technology systems to communicate and exchange data, and to use the information that has been exchanged. In health care, that means being able to share information seamlessly between different electronic health records (EHRs), hospital systems and other care providers. Accordingly, the impact of interoperability is significant. If only it were that easy. The...

Q. If interoperability is simply about getting the right information to the right place at the right time, then why isn't it happening more often?  A. The answer, unfortunately, is that it's not always that simple. For a long time, the topic of interoperability was often synonymous with frustration for patients and providers alike. Instead of being sent electronically, information was locked in paper documents, misplaced, not sent at all or sent too late. With increasing industry...

BOSTON – CommonWell Health Alliance recently marked 1 billion document retrievals passing through its network, a milestone that was sped up by the COVID-19 pandemic, says Nick Knowlton, chairman of the organization and a Brightree exec.  “We’re running more transactions in a week than we did in an entire year in the beginning – we’ve seen a hockey stick uptake in interoperability,” said Knowlton, vice president,...

A. Interoperability has been and will continue to be of great importance to the federal government. After investing billions of dollars to modernize the hospital and physician practice IT landscape, government efforts are clearly aimed at enabling the information contained in those systems to follow patients wherever they receive care—what we term “patient-centric” interoperability. Patient-centric interoperability has the power to help millions of patients. By working to align...

A. At a conference in February, I participated in a demonstration of a new patient-centric interoperability experience to show how data can follow a patient through their transition from acute to home care to primary care. A key takeaway was how we as an industry can leverage different tools that exist in our referral source's systems to gather information necessary for reimbursement, while providing the patient with the best possible care transition experience. Here are some areas to consider with...

A. Interoperability is simply the right information moving to the right place at the right time. As more referral sources have connected to the digital world, it is important for HME providers to electronically receive and share information to deliver better patient care, improve outcomes and enhance relationships with referral sources. The good news is, if you use an information technology system to share data—such as by automating patient orders or receiving completed forms—interoperability...