The Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC), a provider-led initiative to launch a next-generation interoperability platform, announced the commitment of two initial founding members: Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare and LSU Health Care Services Division, a Baton Rouge-based academic healthcare organization.
HSPC also announced appointment of corporate officers including Stanley Huff, M.D., as chairman of the board of directors, and Oscar Diaz as CEO. Dr. Huff is chief medical informatics officer at Intermountain Healthcare. Diaz was previously vice president and general manager of Harris Healthcare Solutions. HSPC also incorporated as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation.
“We launched HSPC to enable software developers to create interoperable applications free of proprietary constraints. Clearly, healthcare is ready for apps that work with any health system’s EHR, regardless of vendor,” Huff said in a prepared statement.
Wayne Wilbright, M.D., CEO of LSU Health Care Services Division, said, “HSPC offers us the most innovative, market-based strategy for enabling the healthcare industry’s significant investment in clinical and financial data systems to be efficiently leveraged to meet the information demands of the evolving value-based healthcare environment.”
At a recent HL7 conference, Huff explained that HSPC was founded with the mission of enabling the acceleration of application development through an open, standards-based, services oriented architecture platform and business framework that supports a new marketplace for interoperable healthcare applications.
The group envisions developers creating applications that don’t need to know about the physical structures of databases in EHRs. So the same application in the cloud using the SMART approach developed at Boston Children’s Hospital integrates into the EHR, and the exact same app can run in Epic, Cerner, Allscripts or Greenway as long as those systems support standards-based services. “Think of the implications,” Huff said. “Today, any useful program has to be recreated in every EHR. As a society, we pay the cost of every one of those pieces of software in vertical architectures.” The services model offers the potential for tremendous advantage and decrease in cost, he stressed.
