8:15 am – 9:30 am Opening Keynote: Joint Venture and Integrated Site Progress Report

In October 2002, VHA and DoD signed an Executive Council Decision Memo that began the Partnership between North Chicago Veterans Affairs Medical Center (NCVAMC) and then Naval Hospital Great Lakes. The first phase of the partnership was accomplished in October 2003 when the Navy shifted their inpatient Mental Health to North Chicago VAMC. Phase III, which will be the final phase of the Partnership is scheduled be completed by October 2010. North Chicago VAMC and Naval Health Clinic Great Lakes will become the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center, after the famous Apollo 13 astronaut. It will be the first fully integrated federal health care center between VA and DoD.

What will be covered:

• Updates from the North Chicago VAMC/Naval Health Clinic Great Lakes
• Challenges faced and lessons learned
• Future benchmarks

How you will benefit:

• Learn about the integration process of the health IT infrastructure from the first VA/ DoD integration site
• Become familiar with the integration process of the IT systems and understand the next steps in the process going forward

Session Leader:

CAPT Tom McGue, USN
Commanding Officer
Naval Health Clinic Great Lakes

10:00 am – 11:30 pm Case studies of MHS and civilian EHR projects: SOA and the Integration Possibilities of New Architectures in Electronic Health Records

This session will focus on web services, NHIN, and layered architectures. Discussion will revolve around finding the opportunities for leverage and reuse among existing technology platforms. The use cases that will be emphasized include image sharing and new technologies for healthcare artifacts and image management – integrating this with the EMR. You will have the opportunity discuss several current MHS projects and where the “challenges faced” and “lessons learned” have come as well.

What will be covered:

• The future of information sharing between federal agencies – our BHIE program with the VA & DoD and its relationship to NHIN
• Unleashing the power of data repositories through SOA, web services, and informatics tools our Clinical Data Repository strategy effort
• Developing business processes and use cases to support health care process reengineering the medical home construct and telemedicine

How you will benefit:

• Discover new web services to enhance EHRs
• Become familiar about BHIE projects and the use of the NHIN

Session Leader:

Mr. Bill Oldham
Chairman and CEO, Evolvent
coauthor of Securing Business Intelligence - Knowledge and Cybersecurity in the Post 9/11 World

11:30am - 12:30pm Creating a Flexible Infrastructure for an Expandable HIE Deployment - Lessons learned from the MidSouth eHealth Alliance (MSeHA).

MSeHA was established almost 5 years ago as a result of an AHRQ grant with the expressed goal of sharing health information within a community to reduce medical costs of the “safety-net” population in Memphis, TN through better care coordination. After several years of practical experience under the AHRQ research grant and collaboration from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Regional Informatics team, MSeHA is evolving to a commercial HIE solution with expanded functionality and an infrastructure designed to expansion to other regions to enable sustainability.

What will be covered:

• History of the MSeHA project
• Challenges faced and successes to date

How you will benefit:

• Learn about the process of transitioning from grant funding to sustainability
• Understand the potential for expansion of functionality, participants, and geographic reach by taking advantage of common infrastructure and architecture

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm State Health IT Transformation: New York State Health IT Strategy: Current Status and Future Issues

New York State has established a sophisticated governance structure for its HIT efforts, led by the Office of HIT Transformation within the New York State Department of Health . Since 2006, New York State has awarded $226 million in public funds to develop and implement a comprehensive health information infrastructure - more than in all other states combined. The state is essentially working to create an HIT "interstate" - a system through which all providers could connect and interface under common practices and guidelines. Once fully established, the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY) is expected to serve as the backbone for HIT in New York and make electronic health information exchange much easier for providers.

What will be covered:

• Current roadmaps for SHIN-NY and The New York eHealth Collaborative
• The use of the Health Information Technology Evaluation Collaborative (HITEC) to evaluate and develop evaluation instruments for HIT initiatives across the state

How you will benefit:

• Learn about the complexity and challenges for building a successful HIT “interstate”
• Understand how success depends on aligning the work of multiple stakeholders through collaboration and consensus-building
• Become familiar with the distinct perspective of building a state wide Health IT system

Session Leader:

Dr. Patricia Hale, MD, PhD, FACP
Deputy Director
New York State Department of Health Office of Health Information Technology Transformation

3:15pm - 4:00pm EMR Optimization, Improve User Experience

Forrester Research asserts that in 74% of the reported help desk cases, IT first learns about performance and availability problems when the users call the Help Desk. The lack of visibility into real end user experience continues to plague many organizations – and “stopwatch” performance tools cannot deliver advanced analytics for preemptive problem detection, cause analysis and right-time decision support capabilities. Healthcare organizations are leveraging a user-centric approach to proactive IT management in order to improve clinician EMR / EHR performance and adoption, while also ensuring proactive post-live support.

What will be covered:

• Specific case studies highlighting the challenges and lessons learned
• How user-centric, proactive IT Management empowers organizations to attain the required service levels demanded by users
• Lessons on how other healthcare organization are improving application usage and usability by implementing the right IT infrastructure for analyzing and correlating application, network, desktop and user productivity performance metrics

How you will benefit:

• Learn how to equip your organization with a user-centric approach to proactive IT Management in order to decrease business disruptions and increase user productivity
• Become familiar with how IT can recognize performance issues long before end users do, and determine the extent and impact of the problem
• Understand how to dramatically reduce the duration of business disruptions and the resulting costs of resolving service level issues

Session Leader:

Marcus Brown
Managing Director
Aternity Inc.

4:15 pm – 5:30 pm Hybrid HIE Focus: Carolina eHealth Alliance – Facilitating Secure Exchange of Patient Information for Emergency Department Users

The Carolina eHealth Alliance exists to provide South Carolina citizens with more effective and efficient delivery of healthcare services through networked systems that share patient-specific information. By testing and studying this data exchange across all phase 1 emergency department access points, the participating hospitals will continue to evaluate the benefits of expansion in patient data as well as in health system facilities and geography. Participating care delivery organizations presently include: MUSC’s ED sites at three different hospitals: the main hospital’s ED, the new Ashleigh River Tower ED, and the Pediatric Hospital’s ED. Additional sites include: two Roper St. Francis Healthcare ED facilities, and the EDs at Summerville Medical Center, Trident Medical Center, East Cooper Medical Center, as well as the New East Cooper Medical Center.

What will be Covered:

• Key issues the “Alliance” will attempt to address
• Potential to include local Navy clinic and VA into the “Alliance”

How will you benefit:

• Learn how a hybrid model HIE solution can provide the benefits in the short term via a federated (de-centralized) approach, as well as addressing long term goals under a non-federated (centralized)
• Learn how competing organizations can learn to work together for the benefit of the community
• When considering participation in an HIE, what are the key functional, organizational, and technological components one must consider

Session Leader:

Mark Daniels
Chief Technology Officer
Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC)