New AMA initiative ties together health, tech sectors

The amount of healthcare data that currently exists is extensive—to say the least. The need for a single platform to house this vast amount of data and is vital. A new initiative from the American Medical Association (AMA) invites representatives from health and technology sectors to collaborate in solving this problem and attribute to a new era of patient care.  

The AMA announced Oct. 16 that it's working to develop a common data model through the Integrated Health Model Initiative (IHMI). According to an AMA press release, the IHMI "fills the national imperative to pioneer a shared framework for organizing health data, emphasizing patient centric information and refining data elements to those most predictive of achieving better outcomes." 

All healthcare and technology stakeholders are invited to participate in the IHMI. Early collaborators include IBM, Apervita, Intermountain Healthcare, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Informatics Association—and the list continues to grow.  

"This important and novel initiative aligns with our mission to help health care providers make essential connections and gain confidence in the decisions they make," said IBM Watson Health Deputy Chief Health Officer William Kassler, MD. "Participation in this collaborative supports our goal to help providers improve patient outcomes and experience, reduce cost, and enhance physician and care team satisfaction." 

The AMA hopes that the IHMI will provide a more seamless common data model system that will improve data management, organization and analytics for participating stakeholders.  

“The IHMI has the potential to significantly jump start U.S. healthcare transformation through improved data interoperability and knowledge exchange for clinical decision support and analytics," said Apervita's Chief Informatics and Innovation Officer Blackford Middleton, MD, MPH, MSc.  

Through this system, the ability for clinicians to shift care plans according to the unique health status, lifestyle and wellness goals of their patients will be easier and more accurate. Simultaneously, interoperability problems and poor databases can be avoided.  

"IHMI imagines all clinicians equipped with essential information to shift care plans towards achieving outcomes that are more relevant to a patient’s quality of life and consistent with the patient’s lifestyle, goals, and health status," stated in the AHA press release. "Given the high economic and societal burden of chronic diseases, IHMI will initially prioritize its resources and efforts in clinical areas such as hypertension, diabetes and asthma."  

Most importantly, the AMA believes that IHMI will provide a fuller picture to clinicians in regards to examining a patient's health journey.  

“We spend more than three trillion dollars a year on health care in America and generate more health data than ever before. Yet some of the most meaningful data – data to unlock potential improvements in patient outcomes—is fragmented, inaccessible or incomplete,” said AMA CEO James L. Madara, M.D in the press release. “The collaborative effort of IHMI will help the health system learn how to collect, organize and exchange patient-centered data in a common structure that captures what is most important for improving care and long-term wellness, and transform the data into a rich stream of accessible and actionable information.”  

 As IHMI launches, the AMA is focused on three main objectives:  

• Hosting clinical and issue-based communities focused on costly and burdensome areas. 
• Providing a clinical validation process to determine and apply appropriate clinical frameworks. Participants will provide contributions and feedback online to specify data elements and relationships. Clinical content submissions will go through a validation process to review clinical applicability. 
• Specifying a model to encode information in the IHMI data model. Clinical content will enable configurations of the model and reference value sets that can be distributed.