In advance of HIMSS15, HealthCare Business News caught up with the society’s chair, Paul Kleeberg, to get the latest updates regarding health care informatics.

HCBN: How did you get involved in health care?
PK: I went to college and got a degree in psychology, and worked with problem kids. Over time, I realized I was catching them at a late phase and wanted to get to them earlier in the process. I thought of going into clinical psychology, but a friend talked me into medicine and I became a family doctor. I was working with people and families, helping them to improve their lives and it really was what I wanted to do. When you’re working in a small town as I was, delivering babies staffing the emergency room, the nursing home and people of all ages, you really feel a sense of accomplishment.

Meanwhile, I had a second career at the time in health information technology. In 1984, as a first year medical student, I bought my first computer; I recognized it was better at recalling and organizing information than I ever would be. That year, I realized health information technology was
the future of medicine. I was so convinced, that in my second year at Stanford Medical School, I convinced the statistics department to require the use computers and I taught the computer part of the course. In 1990 I started a discussion list to have family doctors share their use of health information technology with each other. I learned a lot from these discussions. My careers in informatics and medicine have been parallel ever since.

HCBN: How did you get involved in HIMSS?
PK: I got involved because it was an organization that was leveraging health information technology to improve care. They also had a network of volunteers in which I could participate. When I first started attending the meetings, people were surprised to see a doctor, but that has certainly changed over the years.

HCBN: What are the main reasons an organization like HIMSS is needed today?
PK: HIMSS is an organization that draws from multiple groups – physicians, CIOs, nurses, vendors, academics – it’s a broad spectrum. There are also folks from federal government. We are all are working together to improve health through the use of information technology. As a result of this collaboration, we can develop well informed opinions that focus on improving care in a way that is best for the nation, rather than for one interest group. HIMSS provides informed and collaborative leadership. As a result of this membership, we’re unique for programs that commit to the common good.

HCBN: What challenges do your members face?
PK: There is a great demand on their time, both personally and professionally. The field is moving so fast, with government requirements, demands of software certification, updates to quality reporting measures, and user demand for access to legacy systems. The landscape is also changing, on the quality and value payment front. And all these new technologies cost money, so it puts a stretch on the IT budget. And let’s not forget keeping the data secure. That’s another challenge that has grown in importance.

HCBN: What have been your goals as chair?
PK: Because of my background as a family doctor in a rural setting, I’ve been sensitive to the needs of smaller communities and practices, thus my work with rural providers, small and critical access hospitals. And HIMSS has increased its focus to reach out and provide support for them. There’s talk about how all facilities will merge into larger systems. But that is not always possible or even in the best interest of the community.

Those small facilities need the analytics so that they can market themselves, justify their existence and compete in the marketplace as we migrate toward paying for value. Patient engagement and patient empowerment has also been an important goal of mine — where the patient, family, provider and health care team work together to improve health. It’s a more collaborative way of doing things, and I think with the changes in the way payment reform is headed, that’s going to be seen as more valuable. Patients more actively involved in their care have better outcomes and better experiences, but that is going to take a paradigm shift for many.

HCBN: What are the biggest changes to information management today?
PK: We’ve evolved from information management on paper to EHR silos, to electronic information coming in from multiple places that we need to make sense of. There’s also an enormous amount of data within the EHR that will come from patients due to exercise trackers and other self-monitoring devices. In addition the C-CDA (consolidated clinical-document architecture), delivered to a provider can come from multiple locations.

These C-CDAs can have so much in them that finding the important information is a challenge. Primary care doctors, cardiologists, endocrinologists, ophthalmologists — they will all have C-CDAs. When information for a new patient shows up on my desk I have to make sense of it. How do we package it so a provider can get what they need without having to sort through a lot of chaff?

HCBN: What will the information management look like in 10 years?
PK: From a family doc perspective, I would like us to see a consolidated image of a patient from this mass of data. It will be able to take data and create knowledge. The same will occur on a national and local scale.

HCBN: What initiatives are being worked on at HIMSS right now?
PK: We’ve got a number of initiatives. One for the past couple of years has been our HIMSS Innovation Center in Cleveland with different folks working on IT innovation in a shared space. It really enables people to see the future of health care. It allows vendors and others to test interoperability and IT capabilities all with real-world scenarios.
That interoperability, the secure exchange of patient health information, really is the foundation for improving health. The ONC has their interoperability plan, but the federal government can’t do it alone, so it’s one of our goals to support this process.

Another thing that helps illustrate the value of health information technology, as opposed to just providing studies, is our Health IT Value Suite. It puts stories into “STEPS” – Satisfaction, Treatment or clinical outcomes, Electronic transmission of data, Patient education and prevention, Savings/efficiencies. Each story is told about how health IT helped the outcome — all of those things are plugged into this interactive tool. One can drill down to see how it’s facilitated each of these areas.

Finally, patient engagement has long been a goal of ours. We want to involve patients more in the care process so they are actively involved in their care. It has been shown that activated patients have better health outcomes. We also have started the Personal Connected Health Alliance to facilitate people’s use of health information to improve their lives. It’s in the beginning stages of its work and part of its focus is on data standards needed to allow personal devices to connect to each other.

The transformation of health that needs to evolve from face-to-face fee-for-service, to improving outcomes and managing health is going to call for a paradigm shift. This can’t be done by any one group. All people need to recognize that is the future of care, the future of health. Because of the role health IT plays, to measure and understand what we’re doing and to share it with each other, I think all of us will have a critical role to make sure health IT is part of solution, in order to facilitate this transformation.