Doug Fridsma, MD, President & CEO, AMIA, Chapter 1

We all know that interoperability must be solved, but what’s the first step we need to take? Doug Fridsma believes it’s in changing the definition. “We need to stop thinking of it as a ‘utopian place’ where data can freely flow.” Rather, it should be viewed in a much simpler and more practical way — as “incremental added functionality.” In this interview, the CEO and president of AMIA talks about why interoperability wasn’t baked into Meaningful Use, why he thinks FHIR has great potential, and why patient access has become such a big priority for his organization.

Fridsma also reflects on his time with ONC, discussing some of the difficult decisions that had to be made and why he believes a “front-loaded incentive program” made sense when it came to Meaningful Use, and talks about the work AMIA is doing to advance the field of informatics.

Chapter 1



* About AMIA: “We’ve seen a fairly dramatic change in priorities.”

* Health IT as a stethoscope

* Informatics vs health information management

* EHR 2020 – “It was meant as a repair manual for IT.”

* AMIA’s accreditation & certification efforts

* The push for patient data access: “Information empowers patients.”

* Blue Button initiative – “These are rights that patients have.”



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Bold Statements

As a field, informatics is beginning to mature. It isn’t defined just by what you know; in fact, it’s increasingly being defined by what you do.

Because of the rapid adoption of EHRs, there are a lot of folks that profess to have knowledge in informatics, but what they really understand is health information management. They understand health IT, but not the underlying science of how to extract and use that information in those systems.

Making sure we have access to that information empowers patients, and I think it provides opportunities for entrepreneurs to begin to develop new applications and new services that can help patients manage that information and integrate it more effectively into their care.

The biggest barrier is that many institutions and EHR vendors see patients’ data as an intellectual property asset that can be monetized. And so when you give patients the ability to easily take it out and to give it to someone else, it diminishes the ability of EHR vendors and others to be able to monetize that information.

These are rights that patients have, and I think we as physicians or as providers, shouldn’t question that. Even if people don’t exercise that right, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have it.

Gamble:  Hi Doug, thank you for taking some time to speak with healthsystemCIO.com.

Fridsma:  Sure.

Gamble:  I’d like to start by getting a little bit of a background on AMIA — what the organization does and what are its ultimate goals.

Fridsma:  AMIA is a professional organization that represents informatics professionals at all stages and in all flavors of informatics careers. Historically, we came out of an academic tradition. There have been a lot of researchers, scientists and educators who are really trying to advance the field of informatics, but I think over the course of the last couple of years, we’ve seen a fairly dramatic change in both the composition and the priorities of the organization.

The organization remains committed to evidence generation and that includes the scientific work and papers and things like that, but increasingly, our membership is composed of professionals that are much more applied in their work. We have chief medical information officers, some CIOs, and others that are really trying to leverage all the new information technology that’s out there and use informatics as a way of unlocking potential.

We’ve found that,