The American Medical Association (AMA) announced today announced Integrated Health Model Initiative (IHMI), a new collaborative effort across healthcare and technology stakeholders to develop interoperable technology solutions and care models that evolve with real-world use and feedback. The Integrated Health Model Initiative (IHMI) is a digital platform for bringing together the health and technology sectors around a common data model that is missing in healthcare.
This collective effort will foster patient care models that achieve better outcomes, as well as technical innovations to address poor interoperability, cumbersome or inadequate data structures, and an overload of point-and-click tasks that dampen clinician morale. Early IHMI collaborators include IBM, Cerner, Intermountain Healthcare, American Heart Association, American Medical Informatics Association, and a growing list of other organizations.
IHMI fills the national imperative to pioneer a shared framework for organizing health data, emphasizing patient centric information, and refining data elements to those most predictive of achieving better outcomes. Evolving available health data to depict a complete picture of a patient’s journey from wellness to illness to treatment and beyond allows health care delivery to fully focus on patient outcomes, goals and wellness.
By offering a common health data model for the health system to collect, organize, exchange and analyze critical data elements, IHMI imagines all clinicians equipped with essential information to shift care plans towards achieving outcomes that are more relevant to a patient’s quality of life and consistent with the patient’s lifestyle, goals, and health status. Given the high economic and societal burden of chronic diseases, IHMI will initially prioritize its resources and efforts in clinical areas such as hypertension, diabetes and asthma.
The initial focus of the IHMI will be on:
– Hosting clinical and issue-based communities focused on costly and burdensome areas. This fosters collaborative efforts around common interests and areas of need, such as hypertension management, diabetes prevention, asthma function, and identifying the best available science and practices that define patient-centric care.
– Providing a clinical validation process to determine and apply appropriate clinical frameworks. Participants will provide contributions and feedback online to specify data elements and relationships. Clinical content submissions will go through a validation process to review clinical applicability.
– Specifying a model to encode information in the IHMI data model. Clinical content will enable configurations of the model and reference value sets that can be distributed.
Additional communities will be developed and added to the online platform based on market needs throughout 2018.
“We spend more than three trillion dollars a year on health care in America and generate more health data than ever before. Yet some of the most meaningful data – data to unlock potential improvements in patient outcomes – is fragmented, inaccessible or incomplete,” said AMA CEO James L. Madara, M.D in a statement. “The collaborative effort of IHMI will help the health system learn how to collect, organize, and exchange patient-centered data in a common structure that captures what is most important for improving care and long-term wellness, and transform the data into a rich stream of accessible and actionable information.”
