UCSF joins forces with Cisco to develop interoperability platform
The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Cisco are joining forces in a new scheme to develop an interoperability focused platform to allow health systems, hospitals, providers, payers and app-makers to quickly access relevant patient information, and help stop the proliferation of fragmented information in the healthcare sector. The initial pilot of the platform will take place at  UCSF Medical Center and from there, expand throughout the UC systems and nationwide. Cisco is to be part of a collaborative center working on the project, and provide both staff, and extensions to its business analytics platform to make it compatible with healthcare. 

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Cisco are teaming up for a new initiative to jointly develop an interoperability-focused platform that will enable health systems, providers and app vendors to share and integrate health data from multiple sources. That platform will make pertinent patient information accessible when and where it’s needed for care through a highly secure process.

Health interoperability – defined as the ability of different devices, IT systems and software to communicate, exchange and use shared data – will play an increasingly important role in providing timely, accurate care based on access to real-time patient health data and records.

Interoperability Platform Details

As part of the initiative, Cisco and UCSF will establish a collaborative center at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. At the center, staff from both entities, along with global health technology leaders, will be able to collectively test and scale the interoperability platform across different devices, IT systems and software.

The platform initially will be piloted for patients at UCSF Medical Center and ultimately extend to other affiliated entities within UCSF Health, including UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and joint ventures with John Muir Health and Hospice by the Bay, among others. It is expected to expand rapidly throughout the UC system and with other health care delivery partners nationwide.

Cisco’s solutions for digital business connect data, analytics, processes and experiences across multiple industries. Working with front line innovators at UCSF, Cisco will extend its digital business platform with health care-specific capabilities to enable the rapid creation and deployment of applications focused at specific interoperability challenges within health care. Cisco analytics will create new insight, processes and outcomes with the distinct ability to compute from the data center to the edge, turning raw data into strategic business information.

“Fragmentation of information is one of the most challenging impediments in health care today,” said Michael Blum, MD in an official statement, UCSF associate vice chancellor for Informatics and director of the UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation, which houses this initiative for UCSF. “In human terms, the consequences are enormous: the lack of complete information on our patients leads to poor, costly care, delays in diagnosis or treatment, and dissatisfied patients – all due to health information systems that cannot communicate with one another. In this age of apps, social media, and mobile communications, this status quo is completely unacceptable to both patients and providers. We plan to change all of that with this partnership.”

A platform of this type is critical to enabling health systems to meet the data-exchange and collaboration requirements of the Affordable Care Act, according to Aenor Sawyer, MD, a UCSF orthopedist and digital health leader who was instrumental in establishing the partnership. This platform also will enable providers to incorporate new and valuable sources of information from outside the clinical system, such as personal health applications, wearable sensors, consumer devices and home monitors, which will be integrated with clinical data to optimize health decisions.

“All of us experience varying states of wellness and illness in our lives and contact many points of care, where important data is generated. We move freely between those points of care, but our data does not,” said Sawyer, who is also a cancer patient. “With this interoperability platform in place, the volumes of health data generated from clinical and non-clinical sources can be integrated and analyzed, resulting in accessible and actionable information and, ultimately, better care.”