September, 12 2011
By:
Shelley Price, director, HIMSS Payer and Life Sciences With the mission of supporting the payer community as it works toward the goal of improving individual patient care, quality, and outcomes in a cost-effective manner by fostering collaboration and trust between providers, payers, and health IT vendors though the development of interoperable health IT, the HIMSS Patient-Centered Payer Roundtable is a forum that directly links important health IT stakeholders and the payer community.
Alignment between health IT and payers has become a strategic necessity for both sectors. Through the Roundtable, leaders from the payer, provider, and health IT sectors engage in candid cross-industry dialogue, better integrating the activities and direction of each, and driving the transformation of healthcare through IT.
The Roundtable engages on relevant issues with industry experts, and shares learning experiences and case studies. Activities also include efforts that incorporate the payer perspective into HIMSS’ policy recommendations and activities, and the creation of practical resources (e.g. toolkits and white papers) that will help guide industry stakeholders toward making health IT investments that will improve individual patient care, outcomes, and quality.
Meeting monthly, the Roundtable also leverages the HIMSS network of committees and roundtables to foster collaboration and networking with various healthcare stakeholders. In addition to the payer community, the Roundtable membership is open to the provider, health IT vendor, pharmaceutical, patient, and other communities that are interested and engaged in health IT-enabled payer-provider issues.
This year, the Roundtable will be exploring key themes of creating better collaboration between payers and providers to support improved care and outcomes, and creating a holistic view of payer-provider IT solutions. Topics may include: (1) accountable care/value-based healthcare/care coordination; (2) consumers/consumerism, including the intersection with social media and mobile technologies; and (3) “enabling” issues such as business intelligence, data management, funding models, health information exchange, interoperability, and patient identity.
For more information on the HIMSS Patient-Centered Payer Roundtable, contact Shelley Price, Director of Payer and Life Sciences, at sprice@himss.org.
