During next week's Interoperability Workgroup, we will hear from Bryan Bowles, Vice President, Solutions Marketing for Population Health at Premier, Inc. Bryan will give a brief presentation on the results of last month's ACO Survey.

Following the presentation, the Interoperability Workgroup will focus on the following topics:
- Plans to create an online repository for examples of successful interoperability
- Results of the Workgroup survey on priorities for upcoming work
- Plans for release of the Workgroup report

The Business & Clinical Motivators Workgroup heard from two presenters: Leslie Kelly Hall, Senior Vice President, Policy, Healthwise, who spoke about business case for patient engagement and the business drivers that work in the current reimbursement models.

eHealth Initiative's (eHI) Policy Workgroup Webinar, "Policy Perspectives: Expert Overview of Recently Released CMS and ONC Regulations," was held October 20, 2015, 3:00-4:00 PM EDT.

The Interoperability Workgroup will have their next conference call Monday October 26 at 2:00 pm EDT. The major agenda topic for this call will be next steps for the Interoperability Workgroup. We hope you will be able to join this call and contribute your ideas for projects that the Workgroup should undertake.

For the last three years, eHealth Initiative and Premier, Inc. have explored how public and private ACOs are using health information technology to support transformation in care delivery. In 2015, the eHI and Premier, Inc. ACO survey delved deeper into interoperability, data use, and analytics. The findings identified a number of different ways that ACOs are using analytics and highlighted the difficulties ACOs face in integrating data to support those use cases.

We discussed our members' submissions of best use case examples and continued the work toward the development of a final report, to be released during our 2016 Annual Conference, held February 3-4 in Washington, DC.

This meeting provided the opportunity to hear from Chris Belmont, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Chris discussed the MD Anderson Big Data Strategy and the cognitive computing direction. At the conclusion of his presentation, the workgroup continued to discuss the goal of developing a toolkit with resources and best practices regarding the utilization of data to make informed, clinical decisions at the individual and population levels.

This workgroup provided an opportunity to hear from Madeleine Konig, Senior Policy Analyst with the American Heart Association. Madeleine reviewed the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s initiatives that use health information and electronic tools to inform consumers and providers in order to improve quality of care and support collaborative care. Some programs included in the discussion were My Life Check, Heart 360, the Patient Support Network, Get With The Guidelines (GWTG) and The Guideline Advantage.

The Interoperability Workgroup reviewed and discussed the status of interviews related to the proposed examples of successful interoperability that have been submitted to the workgroup. We discussed alternative approaches to framing these examples in the developing report and identified any critical actions that are needed to complete this.