The Center for Medical Interoperability officially opened its headquarters this week and launched a testing and certification laboratory with the aim of improving patient safety and care. The center is a 501(c)(3) cooperative research and development lab founded by health systems to simplify and advance data sharing among medical technologies and systems.
The center’s board includes CEOs from the following health systems: Ascension Health, Carilion Clinic, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Community Health Systems, Hospital Corporation of America, Hennepin Healthcare System, LifePoint Health, Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, RWJBarnabas, Scripps Health, UNC Health Care System, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The organization’s membership consists of health systems and other provider organizations committed to eliminating current barriers to swift and seamless communication of patient information among medical devices and electronic health records. This will improve patient care by providing clinicians with quick and easy access to all relevant patient data in real time, according to a press release.
The lab, located in Nashville, serves as a research and development arm for its members to improve interoperability. The center’s technical experts and visiting engineers from industry work together to develop IT architectures, interfaces and specifications that can be consistently deployed by health systems, medical device manufacturers, electronic health record vendors and others. The lab certifies devices and software that meet the center’s technical specifications. Clinicians explore the impact of technologies within the Transformation Learning Center at the lab to ensure solutions are safe, useful and satisfying for patients and their care teams.
“The opening of the headquarters and launch of the lab are enormous steps toward addressing the difficulties that health systems share in getting medical devices and electronic health records to ‘talk’ to each other,” Mike Schatzlein, M.D., chair of the center’s board, said in a statement. “All too often, this prevents physicians and other caregivers from having complete information about a patient readily available when they make important treatment decisions. Enabling this type of seamless communication is crucial to improving patient safety and reducing clinician burnout.”
