The April meeting of Health TechNet was held on Friday, April 21, at Nelson Mullins' offices in Washington, D.C.
The feature topic was a discussion of the next phases of meaningful uses from the perspective of vendor suppliers and provider purchasers of new IT technology. Both the vendor and provider communities have faced enormous challenges in keeping up with Meaningful Use requirements, particularly in light of recent changes to the program, incorporation with MACRA, quality measures, and the like. We heard from a panel of providers and vendor representatives about how they are handling these challenges, balancing these requirements with other development priorities, accommodating upgrade schedules and requirements, dealing with customer education, and the like. The panel included Mike Hourigan from Cerner, and Nathan Evans and Dr. Ramanujam Venugopalan from Allscripts.
We also continued the interesting discussion at our March meeting of Natural Language Processing with a presentation by Guy Divita, MS. The presentation was entitled "The Magic Behind Clinical Natural Language Processing for Epidemiological Studies, Surveillance and Quality Metrics". Guy is a computer scientist, author, standards developer and industry leader. He is currently a Research Associate at University of Utah Medical School in the Department of Bioinformatics. Divita has led and published multiple large scale projects including recent work for VA Salt Lake City Health Care System (IDEAS Center) which will be shared at our meeting. He has worked in academia, industry and government at the National Library of Medicine, in the field of Big Data and NLP for several decades and is broadly recognized as a leading expert and platform creator/developer.
Presentations of the speakers are attached.