An Interview with Healthcare Interoperability Expert, Julie Maas

In this new virtual world, I’ve found me new favorite interview style.  I visit the virtual booth of a vendor at a virtual conference and in the chat of the virtual booth I interview one of their experts.  There’s something exciting about the off the cuff answers and the ability to ask specific follow up questions based on the answers.

That’s what I did at the recent DirectTrust Summit when I visited the EMR Direct booth.  Julie Maas, Founder and CEO of EMR Direct, obliged me to the virtual chat interview where she shared more details about EMR Direct, her experience and work with DirectTrust, and the biggest challenge she sees in healthcare interoperability today.  Check out the copy and pasted transcript of my chat interview with Julie Maas below.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and EMR Direct.

I have a technical background and years of experience as a software product manager. My co-founder also has deep internet infrastructure expertise as well as a medical background, so when initiatives like Direct and FHIR were starting to really materialize almost a decade ago, we launched EMR Direct to help make those capabilities more accessible.

It didn’t take us long to sort out that our customer is usually the CTO or the development team faced with implementing challenging interop capabilities. This involves encryption, managing certificates, and complex standards that every EMR vendor didn’t necessarily want to grow an expertise in. So, we help with that and we like to do it in a way that feels like an extension of their team.

Sounds like EMR Direct is kind of the “Intel Inside” many other tech platforms who want to do Direct messaging?  Is that kind of how you see it too?

It’s pretty easy to figure out that we are behind the scenes if you look, but for branding purposes our partners can use vanity domains, manage the user experience, white label many aspects of the onboarding process, and really be in the forefront of the service offering.

What types of companies would benefit from integrating EMR Direct into their product?

Well there are sort of two answers to that. Considering perspective, one or both might apply. 1) Companies which need to act on or otherwise carefully curate all the data they receive – in the same way you don’t have your email just in a mail client but integrated into your business software – to better manage the patient record and workflows like referrals or orders with reports that come back. 2) data transport is automated on the sending side – either because you are enabling transmit from the patient portal, or through decision support type triggers, like ADTs.

What’s your involvement in DirectTrust and where do you see them having the most impact?

I’m what you might call a “lifer” at DirectTrust…I’ve participated since the early days. I have led and contribute to a variety of workgroups and standards as well as serving on the board, but my current focus is the Consumer Credentials workgroup where we are tackling some important policy related topics concerning individual identity.

What’s the most exciting thing you see happening with DirectTrust?

I’m really excited about the degree to which the trust in identity is starting to be in demand. Whether it be as a result of the cybersecurity executive order, emerging/deeper privacy considerations, health equity or data democratization, there are so many concerns driving why we need to bring confidence and transparency to health information exchange and digital identity is one powerful way to do that. DirectTrust is a place where many of us convene and share this mission. I see a lot of collaboration going on that is bringing to bear the promise of better data use that has been a long time coming.

What’s the biggest challenge that healthcare interoperability faces and what’s needed to overcome those hurdles?

Oh wow! I just heard Scott Stuewe [President and CEO of DirectTrust] say this out of my other ear in a summit session! What I agree with him about, is that what we are missing is usability. This is not to say that interface design work is lacking – instead what I mean is that we need to bake in more practices whether at the workflow level or designing the EMR or ancillary apps that help build a better patient record, without making more work for providers. That is a tall order!

When I was young, I remember the first time my mom rented a car when we were visiting my grandparents in Wisconsin. I was baffled and asked her: How do you know how to drive this car that’s not ours? I think when use of patient data is more predictable and better understood it will be more like turn signals, windshield wipers, even the gas pedal and brake…regular places where you know to find data transmission or query resources. Some vendors have this feel already with messaging centers and similar resources.

And I think Scott is on the right track, trying to convene the developers of software for use by clinicians and bringing network operators to the table like we did today at the summit. They all realize the benefits of collaboration and I’m expecting we will see more of it.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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