1upHealth’s CEO shares his perspective on HIMSS 2023

HIMSS 2023 was striking in a few ways.  After a few years, the post-Covid malaise for sure has vanished.  The size of booths, the number of people attending, and the energy around the show floor demonstrated that there is a genuine interest in finding out what is going on in the Health tech industry and how tech companies, like 1up, can meet short term (regulatory) and longer-term data management needs.  

The traffic to our booth was more robust than expected and there was significant depth to conversations.  The topic of FHIR interoperability continues to be a key industry and show floor topic and 1up is ever increasingly seen as a company that customers should talk to and figure out if interoperability will just be used to meet regulatory requirements.  It is clear that new entrants, like 1up, with an open architecture, that is FHIR-based, will have an opportunity to serve the needs of the industry as it moves to a broad scale value-based care model that requires complete, longitudinal, real-time claims and clinical patient data

There was a noticeable and emerging demand pattern for high-quality interoperability solutions however, because the industry has lagged in the adoption of APIs, there needs to be a concerted effort by 1up and others, to connect the purchase of what is perceived as regulatory interoperability infrastructure to a broader set of high-value use cases.

The good news is across the three days of HIMSS that the healthcare IT community, and the federal government, have welcomed the FHIR protocol as healthcare’s first easy-to-use data exchange standard. While broad-scale adoption by payers and providers has proceeded slowly, the constant drumbeat from CMS and other federal regulators is evidence that FHIR is here to stay and it is only a matter of time before this internet data standard becomes the core foundation of how data moves around the industry.  It is worth noting that as FHIR and an internet-enabled data cloud become part of the essential interoperability infrastructure of the industry , the topic of data quality will be elevated. Market-leading solutions going forward will need to ensure that the data that is moving around the industry is correct and complete and up to the standards that other industries have moved to as they became internet data enabled. 

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