Chatting With Chuck Christian, VP of Technology & Engagement, IHIE, Chapter 3

At Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), Chuck Christian has found what could possibly be a dream situation. Not just because he gets to catch up with the many “old friends” he made while serving as CIO at Good Samaritan for 20-plus years, but also because he’s at an organization with an outsourced data center — something he’s been looking for throughout his career. In this installment of our quarterly chat, Christian talks about what he hopes to bring to the table as VP of technology and engagement, how IHIE is working to achieve a long-term plan without losing sight of its main priority, what he thinks of the 21st Century Cures Act, and the importance of sharing best practices.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* “A challenge is an opportunity in disguise.”

* Cutting through the noise — “Tell me what I don’t know.”

* Deep learning to improve workflow

* The high cost of customization

* “Vendors don’t want to do one-offs.”

* Collaboration — “We’re always willing to have conversations.”

* 2017: “We’re going to keep on keeping on.”



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Bold Statements

They don’t need noise; they need information that’s appropriate and timely about what’s going on. If you’ve got a patient in the emergency room that’s got a sprained ankle, the physician doesn’t really need to know that they had an appendectomy 10 years ago.

The big vendors like Epic and Cerner need to be able to write code in a very standard way. Because every time they go and create customizations, there are costs associated with it — not only in writing the code, but maintaining and supporting that code. They don’t want to do one-offs.

It makes us a little bit different in the fact that we can quickly respond to requests from our members and incorporate that into the underlying platform that we’re running. But we’re more than willing to share ideas and information, and we do that on a regular basis.

We’re not in business to make a lot of money. We’re in business to have an impact upon the quality of care that can be provided to the folks that live in Indiana and figure out ways of having that data follow that patient wherever they go.

Christian:  We’ve got a CMIO for one of our members and he comes up with so many great ideas. It’s wonderful. I’ll give you one example. We call it clinical decision support, but I think that’s not a really good moniker. So one thing we’re looking at is, in the not-too-distant future, if you’re a Medicare patient and you’ve had a CT scan of the head in the last six months, and you’re now seeing another doctor and he wants to do another, they’re not going to pay for that second one. I don’t know what the time frames are going to be, but it’s going to be a little bit different depending upon the test. And so that means the second person to do that test is going to do it for free, because they’re not going to be able to bill the patient for it and they’re not going to be able to bill Medicare for it. They’re going to have to eat that cost, and so it’s going to become far more important for them to know that the patient had that study.

Now because CT scans use ionizing radiation, it would be really great to know that before you give that patient another dose of ionizing radiation. And so wouldn’t it be wonderful if when that physician is actually ordering that study, something in the background could go out and look in a repository that has information about where that patient could have services in the state of I...