“The now and the next.”

It is the phrase ringing in our ears on the heels of the annual Cerner Health (CHC) Conference, where 14,000+ of us gathered in Kansas City to discuss change in healthcare. Over the course of three days, attendees soaked in 250+ education sessions from peers and keynote presentations from industry leaders.

In all the sessions and topics discussed, one thing is clear: healthcare will never remain stagnant. It is constantly changing – and as caregivers, payers, patients and solution providers – we must learn how to take on tomorrow’s challenges today while continuing to put patients at the forefront of our work.

While change can be overwhelming, there is tremendous promise in harnessing technology and partnerships to foster greater efficiency, alignment and engagement across the continuum. At the conference, we heard from organizations sharing data between systems to seamlessly manage care across communities. And others using health information exchange to move from decentralized, siloed care management to connected, unified platforms that give transparency to patient health information.

“It shouldn’t matter if it’s Cerner’s EHR or someone else’s EHR, we need data from multiple places, and we need that data to flow freely.”

-Zane Burke, Cerner President, as quoted in HealthcareITNews.

These stories give us hope for the future. At Vyne Medical, we believe strongly in the untapped potential for technology to support patients and families by connecting touchpoints for a more complete picture of patient health information. We are committed to providing solutions that facilitate the secure and audit-able exchange of patient data, ensuring that relevant information is available at the point of need.

At CHC, we talked a lot about the power of big data. Data is everywhere – financial, clinical and more – but tools are needed to aggregate and structure this information for better visibility and insight to achieve high quality, cost effective care. In the Revenue Management Symposium, we discussed how technology and innovation can help manage the business of providing care, especially as the balance of power shifts more to consumers.

“Revenue cycle is often the first and last person a patient talks to…it’s all too easy for the patient to become confused and overwhelmed when it comes to billing due to lack of education. Either we [educate], or our patients don’t know what to do. We need to guide people, and we have an obligation to teach our patients as best we can.”

— Don Paulson, Cerner’s Vice President of Revenue Cycle as quoted in the Cerner blog.

Workforce management solutions are being used to improve patient throughput and communication among caregivers, for example. Innovative strategies such integrating voice recognition technology and multimedia were also presented as new opportunities to create efficiencies, enhance the consumer experience and improve outcomes.

This is exciting to us at Vyne Medical – where our passion is aggregating patient data from any source – voice, fax, image or multimedia. By tying this disparate data to the patient and making it easily accessible across the continuum, we can automate workflows for faster response times, smoother transitions, better engagement and better health outcomes for patients.

“Understanding challenges and opportunities from a clinical, financial and consumer perspective can help organizations achieve a more holistic mindset to better prepare for the future of healthcare.”

– Paulson, Cerner blog.

Integration between Cerner and Vyne technologies is helping providers share data between systems to collaborate more effectively across departments and entities. At Moffitt Cancer Center, for example, shared access to revenue cycle data has helped double the number of appeals pursued each month and reduce administrative denials by 50 percent.

We are in this together – and the opportunities are endless. Let’s keep the discussion going and work today on tackling the challenges of tomorrow. We are committed at Vyne to pursuing innovation every day and continuing to find new ways to connect disconnected data in the health system.