HLN to Participate in HIMSS19 Interoperability Showcase

PALM DESERT, Calif. - Jan. 22, 2019 - PRLog -- For the third straight year, HLN Consulting, a leading medical informatics consulting company,  will participate in the Interoperability Showcase at this year's HIMSS19 Global Conference and Exhibition which is being held in Orlando, FL from February 11-15, 2019. The Showcase itself runs on February 12-14 and consists of a series of connected demonstrations which are collaborative projects between 6-8 organizations using interoperability standards to exchange information and improve the quality and value of the care provided. Together they develop a storyline, or scenario, that contextualizes the value of their demonstration and tells the story of a patient, caregiver, or provider.

This year HLN will participate in two scenarios:

Immunization Integration & Clinical Decision Support (CDS): Immunization schedules have become more complex as vaccines have been added to the routine schedule, especially for adolescents and adults.This scenario will demonstrate the immunizations given over time for a hypothetical patient from early childhood into adulthood as she moves through multiple care locations. Clinical decision support for immunizations, which is becoming available both within local Electronic Health Records (EHR) and in response to queries to Immunization Information Systems (IIS) at the local and state level, informs the clinician about current or future immunization recommendations for the patient.

The recommendations are based on the implementation of complex clinical guidelines developed by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HLN's award-winning ICE Immunization Evaluation and Forecasting System will be featured supporting two different EHRs as a sample patient moves through the scenario. The EHRs will submit the patient's immunization history to the ICE service which will evaluate the validity of each dose and forecast what the patient is due for now and in the future.

Opioid Crisis, the Person & the Population: In this scenario a patient presents to the emergency department experiencing an overdose. Based on the information in the patient chart, an electronic Initial Case Report (eICR) is sent to public health to initiate surveillance and intervention. This data is available for visualization/monitoring of population health impacts by providers and public health. HLN's Reportable Conditions Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) will be featured as the decision support component of electronic case reporting (eCR) in this scenario. RCKMS will receive the eICR - a version of an HL7 C-CDA document - and evaluate its contents to see if the patient represents a reportable case to public health. Data from RCKMS will then be used to construct a Reportability Response back to the EHR with the results.

During the showcase, viewers observe the flow of information between systems as the scenario unfolds. Each demonstration lasts approximately fifteen minutes with an opportunity for questions. The demonstrations occur on a fixed schedule throughout the three-day event.

In developing ICE, HLN worked with the New York City Citywide Immunization Registry (CIR), the Alabama Department of Public Health, and the OpenCDS collaboration which is led by researchers at the University of Utah, Department of Biomedical Informatics. ICE is now in use, or being configured for use, by several governmental Immunization Information Systems (including NJIIS), EHRs (including eClinicalWorks), and the CareDox personal health record. Other EHRs, PHRs, and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) can be easily adapted to incorporate ICE logic and clinical decision support into their systems.

RCKMS is funded by the CDC through the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and deployed centrally to determine if a patient's symptoms and conditions require reporting to one or more public health jurisdictions. The first hospital system (Houston Methodist) and corresponding public health agency (Houston Health Department) in the U.S. to launch electronic case reporting (eCR) using RCKMS launched in October 2018; additional sites in California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Utah are coming online in the next few months.

Come see us in Hall F, Booth 9100 at the Orange County Convention Center.

About HLN

For more than twenty years HLN has been a leading public health informatics consulting company focused on developing and supporting robust technical solutions addressing pressing public health needs. HLN is dedicated to the development, improvement, promulgation, and use of Open Source solutions in health information technology. Much of our Open Source work is focused on clinical decision support (CDS) applications built using OpenCDS, an open source clinical decision support platform, including our Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) and Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) which is supporting the national strategy of electronic case reporting to public health.

More information on HLN Consulting and its open source products can be found at https://www.hln.com.