Chuck Christian, VP of Technology and Engagement, IHIE, Chapter 3

If there’s one word that could best describe Chuck Christian, it’s curious. Throughout his career — from the early days as an X-ray technician to more than 20 years as a health system CIO to now — he is constantly asking questions and trying to find ways to get the industry to a better place. It’s that drive that led him to his current role, where he is helping to lead one of the largest HIEs in the nation in its mission to leverage technology to improve patient care. In this interview, he talks about his passion for understanding policy and translating it to CIOs, his candid take on FHIR and how he believes it can work, how the Indiana HIE has been able to thrive (and what other HIEs can learn from its success), why clinical interoperability is so difficult, and why he believes the industry is just hitting its stride.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3



* Straight talk on FHIR — “It’s not the end-all, be-all.”

* Meeting with Cerner & Epic developers

* 2 components of interoperability: clinical and technical

* How FHIR can work

* Leaving the CIO post — “I need to learn new things.”

* “Passion” for patient care

* The problem with MU: “Tell us where we need to be.”



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Bold Statements

The people that believe FHIR is the next best thing since sliced bread are the people that don’t know too much about it; they only know what they’ve been told. But the people that have been working with it and doing development work and are deep in the weeds on the standards — they’re not so adamant that it’s going to be the be-all, end-all.

Clinical interoperability is very, very difficult because you can’t get anybody to agree on what is the content that we need to share. I run into that every day in talking with physicians and meeting with our members. There are differences of opinions about what information they need and want, and how they want to display, present it and where they can find it.

I’m very passionate the patient care side of things. I can see through a variety of ways of what this technology could do and how it could be brought to bear to improve the health of the people — how it could help prevent duplication of studies and how it could decrease the total cost of healthcare.

I can ask a question from the viewpoint of the healthcare CIO and translate that from an interoperability standpoint, knowing what I know about the variety of health information exchanges and where we’re trying to go.

I think from an industry standpoint, we’re just now starting to hit our stride about what we could do.

Gamble:  I want to get your thoughts on FHIR. This is something where there seems to be two schools of thought. There are people who think this is the next big thing, and there are others who aren’t really quite so sure to rush there yet. I’m going to guess where you stand.

Christian:  I’ll tell you what I know. I’ve listened to both folks, and I boil it down to this. What I’m going to say may sound a little crass, but the people that believe FHIR is the next best thing since sliced bread are the people that don’t know too much about it; they only know what they’ve been told. But the people that have been working with it and doing development work and are deep in the weeds on the standards — they’re not so adamant that it’s going to be the be-all, end-all.

We actually earlier this year had a connectathon sponsored by the Indiana HIMSS and Eskenazi, the Regenstrief Institute, and Indiana School of Medicine.