HealthLX listed as Sample Vendor by Gartner in Hype Cycle for U.S. Healthcare Payers, 2020 Report

Gartner recently listed HealthLX as a Sample Vendor in clinical data integration (CDI) in its Hype Cycle for U.S. Healthcare Payers, 2020 Report.* According to Gartner, “The Gartner Hype Cycle provides critical input for strategic planning by tracking the maturity levels and adoption rates of emerging payer technologies and approaches. U.S. healthcare payer CIOs should use this research to plan their investments to optimize and transform.”

The Hype Cycle report gives position and adoption speed justification for clinical data integration, noting “U.S. healthcare payer CIOs’ urgency to address and adopt CDI is escalating in 2020. In a culmination of more than 20 years of interoperability policy, new regulations from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) mandate that providers and payers freely share timely and comprehensive health data with consumers electronically, using open APIs.”

The report noted, “Payers are not currently well-positioned to respond to these requirements. The approaches to, and technologies supporting, CDI today remain highly fragmented, and payers haven’t typically acquired and processed clinical data with any consistency. Technical challenges — such as standardized and mandated EHR interoperability methods — are still substantial but decreasing, with the industry and regulatory entities coalescing around FHIR data exchange standards. Provider data-sharing agreements, as well as change management across healthcare information technology (HIT) vendors, provider IT departments and payer IT departments remain barriers.”

“The challenges identified by Gartner are the driving forces of our mission, which from the start has been to radically improve healthcare interoperability,” said Will Tesch, CEO of HealthLX. “As a founding member of Health Level Seven International’s (HL7) Da Vinci Project, we’ve seen the efficacy of the FHIR standard in enabling CDI. The platform we’ve developed and which is already in use by many health systems enables payers to deploy FHIR resources and accelerate compliance without the need for custom solutions or replacement of legacy systems.”

The 2020 Hype Cycle report states that “Gartner believes that the unique circumstances in 2020 will accelerate payer adoption of an enterprise approach to CDI over the next two to three years. We see an upward trend in strategic planning initiatives to establish CDI as a payer core capability, as well as a rapidly expanding vendor landscape. Immediate CDI initiatives will focus narrowly on regulatory compliance, and these efforts will establish the foundation to ingest and exchange clinical data broadly. Hence, we advance this profile to the midpoint between the Peak of Inflated Expectations and the Trough of Disillusionment and expect CDI to achieve mainstream adoption within the next three years.”

In its advice to payer CIOs on addressing these barriers to implementing and scaling CDI, Gartner recommends

• • • “Investing in a consolidated, enterprisewide solution. Emphasize normalization, enrichment and integration capabilities, not just the acquisition of the clinical data from various EHRs.

    • Substantiating the statements vendors make about their capabilities in clinical data exchange, analytics enablement and insight delivery. Require disclosure of any solution components that depend on partner capabilities, and details about those partnerships.”

“Gartner’s projection is absolutely in line with what we are hearing from our customers,” said Tesch. “As a team that’s worked in the CDI space for years, and that’s personally invested in solving interoperability challenges in order to improve healthcare for all, we are very excited to see this trend gaining momentum. For small and mid-market health plans, the HealthLX platform is the ideal solution.”

*Gartner, “Hype Cycle for U.S. Healthcare Payers, 2020,” Mandi Bishop, Jeff Cribbs, Bryan Cole, 5 August 2020.

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