Q&A: Signature Healthcare CIO on Leveraging Interoperability as a Competitive Advantage – Becker’s Hospital Review

While TefCA has upgraded the difference at the national level, signature healthcare (Brockton, Mass) has moved even further and embraced the difference as part of its business plan to stay independent. A part of these efforts was to adopt Meditech’s Advanced National Interpreting Network, Traveers Exchange. Network enables the safe exchange of health information between healthcare organizations regardless of their EHR system. Traverse Exchange takes advantage of a FHIR-FIRST design to increase data purposes, eventually reduces the workload for the care teams and adapt the patient’s experience.

Signature Vice President and Chief Information Officer, who recently sat down to discuss interoperability with Meditech Senior Director of Inter -Operation Market and Product Strategy Mike Cordiro and how they are taking advantage of strategic advantage within their expansion EHR.

MC: As a healthcare system, you provide many services to your growing patient population. How does Traverse Exchange support care coordination?

JD: One of the peculiarities we provided is to care for cancer, and a goal is to keep our patients within our network. But, if our patients choose to go out of the network, we can exchange that data very easily through Travers Exchange. This improves care coordination by closing those intervals, running better results and reducing costs. Most importantly, we are improving experience for our consumers. So we are actually excited about this network, and take advantage of us to help us grow and survive, so we can be fiercely independent as a community hospital.

MC: In 2023, you opened three immediate care facilities after the signature of the hospital was closed due to a serious fire. More than 50% of the patients treated on these features were from outside the network of signatures. Can you share some lessons learned about the value of interoperability from that experience?

JD: It is very important to know as much as possible about any patient that you have not treated before. This is as much as our patients as much as possible that receive care on features outside the network so that we can better coordinate their overall care plans. Like many health systems, there is a part of our population that travels regularly, such as snobards that go down to fluorida for winter. We want to be able to coordinate their ongoing care with the providers they see traveling. And eventually, physicians will have access to the most meaningful information available within their workflows. The Traveers Exchange Network of Interoperability and Meditech support these objectives.

MC: Can you share what the pre -data exchange for the providers was and what do you imagine such as we roll out additional data utility features with Traveers Exchange?

JD: Data exchanged, but continuity care documents were clunk, chunky, and were not very useful for many of our providers. They wanted something better.

Traverse Exchange is going to help us get friction from our providers and it becomes easy to reach those records as they move forward. We can see that a lot of value proposals for us, and of course are going to help in the clinical data exchange with partners referred to, our development strategy.

MC: How does your freedom affect by sharing better data?

JD: If we are able to exchange data with epic or OraCle Cerner sites, we do not need to really change our EHR strategy to flourish and survive in this market.

MC: As a value-based care system, the data exchange with payments is important but privacy. One of the matters discovering meditech includes data exchange with payments. How will you see this effect signature?

JD: Traverse Exchange is going to lead a path to provide us with appropriate level access to our payment partners so that we can coordinate care and also cut costs. This will be a winning partnership between us and the payers. And, most importantly, it will benefit patients.

MC: Any final view on interoperability in Signature Health?

JD: Advanceing interoperability supports our value-based care and population health initiatives as well as improves care, quality and patient retention. We are ready to continue on our route of growth, freedom and excellent care distribution for their community of about 500,000 inhabitants in the region.

Signature Health Service is one of the many meditech customers who are crossing the exchange to eliminate data fragmentation and convert meaningful data into actionable insights. Look at the complete interview with Signature Healthcare and learn more about how Travers Exchange is pursuing interoperability in healthcare.