“Where’s Waldo? Discovering the Availability of Interoperability for Everyone” is the presentation title
Washington DC – October 18, 2018 – Today Jon Elwell, CEO of Kno2®, the company that provides Interoperability as a Service to everyone in healthcare, told attendees of the National Association of Long Term Hospitals (NALTH) Fall Leadership Conference and Advocacy Hill Day that “In the “Where’s Waldo?” book series, you always began with the understanding that Waldo was in the picture somewhere. The challenge was finding him in the midst of everything else going on. The same is true today for interoperability in healthcare.” He went on to say that if one based availability solely on Health IT headlines communicated through healthcare, then it is easy to assume that interoperability is simply complex and elusive. In his presentation, Mr. Elwell brought the “Waldo” of interoperability out of hiding, and provided evidence that interoperability is, in fact, simple and available to everyone.
He stated to the audience that the reasons why not everyone has it is because:
- Early stages of Meaningful Use excluded important sectors of healthcare, thus the EMR companies focused on these sectors were not aggressively pursuing interoperability
- The obvious is often difficult to recognize
- The historical view of interoperability perpetuated the perceived complexity and capital investment required
Mr. Elwell concluded that the search for effective and efficient interoperability can end with the easy and affordable adoption of simple however, powerful “networks” like Direct Messaging, query-based exchange using Carequality or CommonWell Health Alliance and HIE connectivity.
