Mario Hyland

Senior Vice President & Founder

AEGIS.net, Inc.

Q&A with

What is the most pressing challenge facing data exchange? How is Health IT related to that challenge?

The greatest challenge facing data exchange today is ensuring a consistent standards-based implementation that allows organizations to share and be interoperable. The standards are evolving. That means we need to work to adopt the latest standards while also ensuring backward compatibility until everyone catches up.

What does AEGIS.net, Inc. do to impact or help this challenge?

AEGIS offers the Developers Integration Lab (DIL), an automated, open source, cloud-based, always available, Testing as a Service (TaaS) solution for health information exchange standards conformance and interoperability testing.

Finish the sentence: eHI is important to me because...

…it provides direction to an industry badly in need of it. eHI is in the process of supporting the industry in developing a number of roadmaps for 2020. One of those is around interoperability.

Finish the sentence: It might surprise people to know that...

…in many parts of the country today in 2015, interoperability from provider to provider and sometimes even within a large health system does not exist. Patients still depend on doctors waiting for faxed medical records to help them administer critical care.

Where do you see the future of healthcare (as it relates to interoperability)?

In the future, any doctor, provider, or medical professional looking to provide a patient with care should have the ability to have a seamlessly integrated secure exchange of information around the clinical history of a patient.

How do you see eHI’s 2020 Roadmap impacting the future of healthcare?

eHI can bring together the right industry experts to share lessons learned and publish it while continuing to be a platform for building a community around shared experiences – and accomplishing all of this free of some of the political pressure that government agencies have to deal with.

eHealth Initiative, as a multi-stakeholder non-profit, can make a difference within the industry in the following way(s):

Advance initiatives including:

National patient Identifier
National Provider Directories
National Consent Policies Architectures
Medical Record Banking Systems

Bio

Mario Hyland is the Senior Vice President and Founder of AEGIS.net, Inc., a CMMI Maturity Level 3 rated, ISO 9001:2008 certified small business and premier provider of Information Technology Consulting Services to Federal Civilian, Defense and Commercial sector clients. AEGIS’ core capabilities include Software Functional and Performance Testing, Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V), Application Design/Development, Project Management, and Organizational Performance/Process Improvement.

AEGIS’ domains of expertise include Health IT and Interoperability, Regulatory Compliance, Finance, Human Resources, and Logistics. Mr. Hyland is responsible for AEGIS’ overall vision, strategy and growth, providing executive leadership across all aspects of AEGIS’ operations, with particular emphasis on Business Development, Marketing and Strategic Alliances. Mr. Hyland has an in-depth knowledge of Government Information Technology market trends and supports an extensive network of government and industry executives. He is a trusted strategic and tactical advisor to C-level executives in IT planning, System Implementation, Organization and Governance, Strategic Planning, and Performance Accountability.

Mr. Hyland’s entrepreneurial background includes numerous successful business endeavors in a variety of industries. This vast experience has given him unique insight into patterns of business success and IT solutions. In addition to guiding the corporate direction of AEGIS, Mr. Hyland remains "hands on" when it comes to developing strategic vision with customers and in the operation of AEGIS’ software system testing activities. Mr. Hyland engages regularly with industry organizations such as ACT-IAC, ANSI, HIMSS, HL7, and IHE. He routinely participates in National & International HIMSS, IHE North America and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Connectathons.

Mr. Hyland also chairs the OSEHRA Interoperability Work Group (IWG). Mr. Hyland has been a pillar of the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase for over five years, providing industry expertise on “Continuous Interoperability Challenges and Solutions.” Mr. Hyland’s guidance on Interoperability and the Integrated Ecosystem has been sought by Senior Leadership within HL7, Healtheway, AMA, AHIMA, HIMSS, IHE USA and IHE International, as well as by Federal Agencies, including the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense and Health and Human Services.

Mr. Hyland’s current focus centers on evangelizing and sharing experience-based knowledge about the challenges facing true Symantec Interoperability. This is a national platform that seeks to ensure Health Information Exchange by driving awareness of the vital importance of rigorous testing (beyond the Happy Path and Peer-to-Peer testing approaches). This is accomplished via “Quality Assurance Infusion,” where a Test Driven Development (TDD) Model enables a Test-Early and Test-Often paradigm within a Synthetic Sandbox (the AEGIS Developers Integration Lab or DIL), which simulates a real world Integrated Ecosystem of Healthcare Communities and Healthcare Organizations.

Mr. Hyland has been interviewed and published in articles on Federal Healthcare market trends, Interoperability and IV&V, has been quoted in numerous Industry trade publications on emerging IT issues, and has been the plenary speaker on high-profile IT topics throughout his career. He serves as an active member of both Open Health Tools (OHT) and the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA). Mr. Hyland has been selected to lead the “Advancing an OHT-Open Source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Electronic Medical Ecosystem” Project.