Tech industry aims to improve healthcare through cloud technology
On Monday August 13, President and CEO of the global voice of the tech sector, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), Dean Garfield and several ITI member companies participated in the Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference at the White House where they announced their commitment to removing barriers for the adoption of technologies for healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI.
“Today’s announcement will be a catalyst to creating better health outcomes for patients at a lower cost,” said ITI president and CEO Dean Garfield. “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.
“We commend the White House Office of American Innovation for their leadership in being a catalyst for moving health care beyond siloed systems and varied data standards. As well, we celebrate Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce for their commitment to helping to advance open healthcare standards such as HL7, FHIR, and the Argonaut Project. The opportunity to unleash greater innovation in health care is here and working together we can seize it.”
“At Google Cloud, we are committed to enabling interoperability of healthcare data through AI and the Cloud,” said Gregory J. Moore MD, Ph.D., Vice President of Healthcare, Google Cloud. “We are pleased to join others in the technology and healthcare ecosystem in this joint commitment to remove barriers and create solutions for the adoption of technologies for healthcare data interoperability. This will enable the delivery of high quality patient care, higher user satisfaction, and lower costs across the entire healthcare ecosystem.”
“IBM believes that patients should have access to their data, and the flexibility to use products and services across different healthcare systems, with confidence that they all are working seamlessly for their care,” said Mark Dudman, Head of Global Product & AI Development, IBM Watson Health. “We are proud to participate in this pledge and look forward to working with industry and the developer community to ensure appropriate access to data and the use of that data to support vibrant communities and solve health challenges for people everywhere.”
“The healthcare industry’s shift to the cloud gives the world a historic opportunity to ensure that frictionless and secure interoperability of health data becomes a reality,” said Dr. Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare. “Today Microsoft is pleased to make this public commitment to work with great companies, the ITI, the Administration, and others to create a foundation for a more intelligent, more cost-efficient, and more satisfying healthcare system.”
They share the common quest to unlock the potential in healthcare data, to deliver better outcomes at lower costs.
In engaging in this dialogue, they agreed on these foundational assumptions:
- The frictionless exchange of healthcare data, with appropriate permissions and controls, will lead to better patient care, higher user satisfaction, and lower costs across the entire health ecosystem.
- Healthcare data interoperability, to be successful, must account for the needs of all global stakeholders, empowering patients, healthcare providers, payers, app developers, device and pharmaceuticals manufacturers, employers, researchers, citizen scientists, and many others who will develop, test, refine, and scale the deployment of new tools and services.
- Open standards, open specifications, and open source tools are essential to facilitate frictionless data exchange. This requires a variety of technical strategies and ongoing collaboration for the industry to converge and embrace emerging standards for healthcare data interoperability, such as HL7 FHIR and the Argonaut Project.
- Understand that achieving frictionless health data exchange is an ongoing process, and members commit to actively engaging among open source and open standards communities for the development of healthcare standards, and conformity assessment to foster agility to account for the accelerated pace of innovation.
Together, they believe that a robust industry dialogue about healthcare interoperability needs will advance this cause.