Weekend reading: Can Nashville become the nation's lab for e-health?

Star Technologies, Vanderbilt, public and private entities hope to push the health-information sector to critical mass

Email | Print By Milt Capps

04-28-2006 12:12 PM — It may be tinged with boosterism, but an alluring case is emerging for Nashville’s becoming a national laboratory for development of e-health technologies.

The argument gains strength from rising global interest in health information technologies, Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s (VUMC) push to transform healthcare and medical education, and the university's bulging pipeline of marketable e-Health products.

The recent advance of Nashville-based Star Technologies, Inc. takes on added significance in this environment.

A Vanderbilt start-up, Star Technologies has been led the past year by CEO Gary Zegiestowsky, who yesterday confirmed for NashvillePost.com that the company has signed its first informatics client – its former beta-test partner Bassett Healthcare, a nonprofit system in Cooperstown, N.Y.

To increase emphasis on its informatics mission, Star's management team is known to be contemplating changing the company's name to Informatics Corporation of America, though Zegiestowsky declined formally to confirm the change -- even though several sources have confirmed it to NashvillePost.com. The company has 13 employees in its West End Avenue offices, and the complement may be 25 by year-end.

It’ll take more than one fledgling firm, of course, to produce an informatics “Big Bang,” with Nashville as its epicenter.

Mark E. Frisse, director of regional informatics initiatives within the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health, recently told NashvillePost.com he believes Nashville's claim to being the "Silicon Valley of Healthcare" will be more credible if the city is first turned into "a laboratory for innovative technology for the public good."

Frisse said Nashville’s policy-makers, institutions and innovators must collaborate to encourage advancement of locally developed technologies and operational expertise, much as he believes was done in creating the renowned Silicon Valley.

Enter William W. Stead, M.D., to whom Frisse reports and who is VUMC's associate vice-chancellor for health affairs and founding director of the Vanderbilt Informatics Center.

Stead told NashvillePost.com earlier this week that individual healthcare facilities should aggressively pursue “evidence-based individualized care” by developing and sharing technologies and experimental management approaches that rapidly produce operational benefits in actual healthcare settings.

Stead cited as an example of such real-world experimentation Vanderbilt’s subcontractor role in support of the Mid-South eHealth Alliance at Memphis, a project funded by the state with major support from the federal Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Beyond Vanderbilt, the influence of Nashville's health informatics elite is spreading. Antoine Agassi, a former Spheris technology executive here, is now chairman of the state's e-Health Advisory Council, reporting to Finance and Administration Commissioner Dave Goetz, with regular contact with Gov. Phil Bredesen. Agassi is expected to announce the roster of his task force members soon.

In addition, middle Tennesseans have been or are soon expected to be named to a wide range of government, industry and academic groups addressing informatics and transformation of the healthcare delivery system. For example, one or more local appointees are expected to take part in a new Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) "Consensus Project," funded by a foundation associated with the American Health Information Management Association. Dr. Molly Coye, who will lead the Consensus Project's steering committee, told NashvillePost.com yesterday that the group's announcement is imminent. (Related story here)

dodds@conmergence.com States:

Posted on 5/2/2006 4:19 pm

Also Nashville-based is the Medical Banking Project which is cooperating with industry standards groups to coordinate existing standards and sponsoring the Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture & Technology reference architecture initiative. New technology profiles that support real-time processing will emerge from this effort. Thus MBProject is shepherding the creation of a new type of open source standard (and new components) called "mbXML" for "medical banking extensible mark-up language". Advisors and input from groups which include (by stakeholder type):
Healthcare Providers: American Hospital Association, Solutions (AHA)
Banks: The National Clearing House (NCHA)
Consumers: National Health Council (NHC); Consumers for Healthcare Choices (CHCChoices); Family Voices; National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) at The Urban Institute; MedicAlert Foundation
Healthcare IT: Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS); Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE); Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC)
Employers: Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)
IT: Eclipse Foundation, HL7, HR-XML.org, National Center for Biomedical Ontology, NetBeans, OASIS, OMG, OpenEHR, Open Group's Universal Data Element Framework initiative, etc.

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Weekend reading: Can Nashville become the nation's lab for e-health?

Star Technologies, Vanderbilt, public and private entities hope to push the health-information sector to critical mass

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dodds@conmergence.com States:

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