HIMSS G7 Will Soon Convene and Seeks Your Comments

The term “G7” connotes a global leadership summit with seven nations.

The new HIMSS G7 is a thought leadership summit focused on designing the healthcare financial network of the future with seven healthcare stakeholders – healthcare providers, health plans, employers, consumers, banks, government and technology firms (including life sciences technology). 

With so much focus today on the building blocks of this network (Affordable Care Act, Section 1104, 5010 compliance, ICD-10 implementation, “meaningful use” and administrative technology), it seems that the most any single entity can do is react.

HIMSS G7 seeks to get above the fray and deliver nine critical “G7 Advisory Reports” over the next 36 months that will help stakeholders to design a high-value network that meets the needs of those who use it almost everyday!

To implement this kind of thought leadership requires multiple stakeholders at the table. We also have multiple sponsors that we think will diversify and enrich our thinking. We are supporting three meetings each year for the next 36 months – nine meetings in all – that will help us to carve out critical path issues as we build a high-value healthcare financial network in America (and beyond).

Prior to each G7 Roundtable, we want to hear your thoughts about the topics that we are discussing. Our first official G7 Roundtable will be at the HIMSS Medical Banking Project Leadership Forum on October 6 and 7. While only HIMSS members and invited subject matter experts may attend (there are space limitations at the venue), we want to collect and enter your comments into the program.

The Vanderbilt Center for Better Health is facilitating the first G7 Roundable. The Center routinely provides an exceptional and highly interactive program that drives deliverables.

Our focus at this meeting will be on two topics:

(1) how banks teaming with healthcare financial systems can support Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs); and

(2) the challenges of real-time adjudication and a design model.

Much thought has been given to ACOs, and now that the Affordable Care Act includes accountable care organizations, we want to assess how information technology can support the various roles of the ACO participants – providers, consumers and others – and the requisite business processes that each will encounter in the new model.

We see, for example, a potential need for:

• card-based programs;
• real-time data routing;
• a more sophisticated cash management program that can support payment bundling; and
• the re-arrangement of technologies that support the people, processes and systems required in the patient-centered medical home model.

In addition to ACOs, the Affordable Care Act seems to “tee up,” as one of the HIMSS newest white papers on the health reform bill suggests, “real-time adjudication.” This logic focuses on creating electronic business processes that will support healthcare financial managers as they run the enterprise.

Yet, there are a number of approaches for real-time adjudication, some of which completely bypass systems integration to offer a “hotel method” for payment. My last post, in response to an article in the New York Times around this issue, discussed this issue in more detail.    

Please respond to this post or you can email me at jcasillas@himss.org with a lengthier document. However you decide to contribute, please do, as together we design a high-value healthcare financial network!

I look forward to hearing from you!