ORLANDO – When asked whether InterSystems has an overarching theme as it prepares to open its booth here at HIMSS24 on Tuesday, Kathleen Aller, the company’s head of global healthcare market strategy, offers a simple answer: “Health data and interoperability, and the things it makes possible.”
That goal – easy to describe but exceedingly complex to achieve – will be familiar to anyone who’s been watching InterSystems and all the work it’s been doing over more than 40 years to connect organizations from across all corners of the healthcare ecosystem.
“Interoperability is and always has been our bedrock,” said Aller. “We do interoperability at scale.”
And for all the work that has been done over the past four decades to lay the groundwork for seamless, right-data-at-the-right-time-for-the-right-people information exchange, those efforts are arguably more important now than ever.
“As you look at where the industry is going, where you look at artificial intelligence, you can’t do AI if the data is not ready, if it’s not comprehensive,” she said. “You need the tech to manage it. And we have that technology. You need to build AI solutions and embed them in healthcare applications. And we’re doing that.”
Beyond supporting AI initiatives, InterSystems has several other key priorities it’s planning to highlight at HIMSS24.
High among them: looming interoperability mandates for health plans, with CMS rules requiring application programming interfaces for payer to payer data exchange.
“This is a huge issue in the U.S.,” said Aller. “APIs are a piece of that. But the APIs are the easy part. It’s having the longitudinal record that the mandate assumes is going to be there. And I believe that’s going to be critical to have in place to stage the whole process and move people to the rules they have – the operational changes that they need in 2026 and then to the API implementations in 2027, and then continue to ramp up.”
InterSystems will also be highlighting its innovation work with a wide variety of healthcare organizations, said Aller, who notes that its platform is “built on by Epic, built on by the VA, built on by 3M.”
It’s also built on by “a lot of young companies, many of whom will be featured in our booth,” she said, “and we encourage people to come by and meet with them.”
One of them has developed a “device that fits on your tooth and monitors your health through your saliva.” Another is using the technology to help match up patients with trials and let patients choose to share their data and get into the clinical trial network. “We’ve got somebody else who’s looking at genomics.”
The VA will be showcasing some of its own interoperability use cases with InterSystems, as will the eHealth Exchange, “talking a lot about what they’re doing on the QHIN and the work they’re doing proving out FHIR use cases at a national scale.”
InterSystems will also be a significant part of the redoubtable Interoperability Showcase. The company is part of its years-long participation in HL7’s DaVinci Project – designed to foster FHIR expansion across the industry. “We have a … joint presentation between Michael Marchant from UC Davis and Russ Leftwich from InterSystems and HL7. Jocelyn Keegan from Point of Care Partners, who manages the Da Vinci project, will also be presenting in our booth,” Aller said.
Outside the booth, InterSystems is showcasing several education sessions, including one, “GenAI’s Got Talent – Can It Save Healthcare?” that was previewed here.
Another one, scheduled to be moderated by Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, is focused on “talking about digital health innovation beyond AI.” As part of the panel, Medidata Solutions, a clinical research organization, will be showcasing what it’s doing to “electronically source real-world evidence,” and 3M Health “will be talking some about what they’re doing, and Jen will be kind of pulling that together within a digital health framework.”
The third big session – it’s invite-only, but invites can be requested – is a luncheon focused on payer attendees, centered around “regulation as a catalyst for health plan innovation and health plan strategy,” said Aller. It will feature Dominick Bizzarro, chief strategy officer at MVP Health (and former managing director of InterSystems Health Share).
“He’ll be talking about an agile approach to strategic planning that’s informed by what the feds and the state regulators are doing and how to incorporate that and not make your whole approach to regulations be a matter of, ‘I gotta check that box,’ but rather planning for the long term so that you can achieve compliance but also be achieving your long-term goals,” Aller explained.
As for new products and announcements, InterSystems has several.
“We just released on our website our Intersystems Payer Solutions, which are geared toward addressing the new interoperability and prior authorization mandate,” she said.
“And we’ll be talking about our National Gateway Service, which is sort of one connection to connect to the QHINs or to Carequality or to CommonWell through a sort of a one-stop shop.”
InterSystems will also be highlighting its research data pipeline, which is a FHIR-based feed to OMOP research data models.
Mostly, Aller says she’s just looking forward to the conversations she’ll be having with customers, clients and other HIMSS24 attendees.
“One of the challenges of being InterSystems is we’re kind of broad, so we serve those who are building solutions, those who are providing care, those who are paying for care. One of the conversations that we will be having is we are crowdsourcing opinions around genAI [generative AI] and where it’s going to go and where people see the best use of genAI.
“We have a survey we’ve been running at some other events, and we’re going to run it at HIMSS – we encourage people to come and share their opinions,” she added.
“One of the data points that we’ve noticed comes through very strongly is that when we ask people what they see as the greatest risk from genAI, it’s that issue of patient data being released into the public domain, either unconsented or unintentionally, or both.
“When we looked at a survey of about 134 respondents, we got 45% of them expressing that as their biggest concern. So that’s going to be one of the things I’m going to be interested in talking about with people is how do we mitigate that? What does that mean? We have to think about from a product standpoint, from a governance standpoint, where do we go with that? How does that inform our future?”
InterSystems is in Booth #1361 at HIMSS24.
