Intermountain Healthcare: How to Create the Next Generation Health IT Platform

Stan Huff, CMIO, Intermountain Healthcare. Currently, each EMR vendor uses proprietary clinical data models and terminology to represent clinical data.  This means that sharing data is difficult, sharing executable software across vendors is impossible, and each useful application must be created or re-created on each different platform. This in turn leads to unmet needs for healthcare applications and decision support modules, and drives software costs higher than they need to be.  The Healthcare Services Platform Consortium has a strategy for creating standards-based services that can enable an “app store” for healthcare software that will permit sharing of applications and decision support across vendor systems. This strategy can lead to a new kind of healthcare marketplace.