Care Org Co-Develops Health IT For Enhanced Interoperability

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) health system has partnered with a medical device vendor to develop health IT that will boost interoperability and improve the patient experience.

UCSF’s partnership with Royal Philips will utilize Philips HealthSuite to leverage artificial intelligence that promotes patient access to personal health information, while supporting UCSF providers through intuitive workflows and clinical decision support. The technology will also allow patients to select providers and access virtual care.

The cloud-based platform is slated to enable greater care coordination across diverse settings as well, which is key as health systems continue to expand their networks and bring care into the community.

“Our goal in partnering with Philips is to serve our patients better,” Aaron Neinstein, MD, associate professor of medicine and director of clinical informatics at UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation, said in a press release.

“The services we enable on this platform will help people more easily find the right provider for the care they need, eliminating the worries and delays people often experience,” Neinstein continued. “We know that people need convenient access to care, whether for their acute symptoms or chronic conditions, and we can provide a more comprehensive, continuous feeling of support from their care team enabled by virtual and in-person experiences across their care journey.” 

The medical device vendor’s open API-based platform will integrate data from different data streams in an effort to improve interoperability and ease clinical staff burden while providing more comprehensive data analytics to support population health initiatives.

“Over the past few years, UCSF Health has developed a network of high-quality providers across the Bay Area who share our vision to make healthcare more accessible, affordable and personalized,” said Shelby Decosta, president of UCSF Health Affiliates Network and chief strategy officer for UCSF Health.

“Our partnership with Philips will empower UCSF Health with navigation tools to bring this vision to life across our network of world-class hospitals, community clinics and outpatient centers, as well as through virtual care,” Decosta continued.

The agreement includes a mix of applied research and digital solution implementation that spans from the development of artificial intelligence algorithms to improve patient experience, to connecting multiple hospitals to promote care coordination.  

The partners will create and share best practices with the healthcare industry to outline how to deliver value-based care while improving the experience for patients and staff alike.

UCSF’s new partnership comes as health systems take steps to comply with the ONC final interoperability rule which prohibits information blocking and calls on medical providers and device developers to promote patient data access using third-party apps and APIs.

Once APIs are used more widely across the healthcare continuum, their research utilization should expand, according to the ONC.

“The data sources that exist to inform clinical and biomedical research are more diverse than ever, drawing from electronic health records (EHRs), genomic tests, recordings from wearable devices, and patient surveys, to name a few,” ONC wrote in the Researcher Perspectives on APIs report. “The insights that can be drawn from these require effective data collection, aggregation, and sharing in addition to health IT infrastructure capable of supporting research goals.”