LANSING, Mich., March 26, 2019 — During the 2019 HIMSS Global Conference, Velatura, a subsidiary of Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services, unveiled a new product focusing on a collaborative, data visualization environment to increase interoperability within healthcare. Interoperability Land™, a simulated healthcare environment hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, is designed to power the future of multi-organization development, integration, acceptance and testing of innovative technologies.

Within Interoperability Land, developers are able to safely design develop and test collaboratively within on-demand test environments, simulated Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and API sandboxes. In addition, Interoperability Land offers minimal legal and governance hurdles, no risk of involuntarily exposing protected health information all while maintaining control of their intellectual property.

During the conference, Velatura held a Birds of a Feather information session to provide additional details on Interoperability Land, as well as listen to interoperability challenges and barriers from potential users of the product.

“The industry, as a whole, needs more robust testing and a stronger feedback loop when it comes to interoperability,” says Amit Trivedi, Director, Informatics and HIT Standards, HIMSS, who attended the session. “The session helped to highlight these issues and from the discussion, it seems that Interoperability Land will help address these issues in the process to develop standards-based interoperability.”

“Within Interoperability Land, developers are able to see how their Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR) applications and services interact with one another in an engaging and meaningful way,” says Tim Pletcher, CEO, Velatura. “When developing within Interoperability Land, being able to visualize the data connections enables a collaborative approach to develop standards-compliant solutions, while lowering the cost of development and prototype building through the pre-populated content available within the product.”

Looking to the future, Interoperability Land will help support the future of Medicaid Modernization and the evolution of the Medicaid Information Technology Architecture through enabling states and federal agencies to support migration to open API’s and new interoperability standards (e.g. FHIR). In addition, Interoperability Land can serve as a mechanism to establish the acceleration of pilot projects and the evolution modular Medicaid enterprise systems and in the future serve as a foundation for future agile procurement of software as a service and open API’s.

“Real interoperability starts with human connection. It happens when clinicians and technologists from different, but dependent organizations decide to dream, orchestrate and implement a workable solution to their common problem,” says Howard Follis, M.D. President & CEO, Juxly. “MiHIN is leading the way by creating human connection through events like Birds of a Feather at HIMSS and enabling actionable next steps through their Interoperability Land project testbed.”

Additional information on Interoperability Land functionality can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fIQqfERuQE&t=5s.

Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services

The Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) is Michigan’s state-designated entity to improve healthcare quality, efficiency, and patient safety by sharing electronic health information statewide, helping reduce costs for patients, providers, and payers. MiHIN is a nonprofit, public-private collaboration that includes stakeholders from the State of Michigan, Health Information Exchanges serving Michigan, health systems and providers, health plans/payers, pharmacies, and the Governor’s Health Information Technology Commission. For more information, visit https://mihin.org.

About Velatura

Velatura strategically aligns and connects people, organizations, technology, ideas, and information to improve healthcare, simplify work and reduce costs. Offering market-driven solutions, as well as being the sole provider of MiHIN products and services, Velatura supports organizations in their mission to interoperate and streamline the sharing of pertinent electronic information. For more information, visit https://velatura.org/.

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For additional information, contact:

Alyssa Jones
Public Relations Manager
Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services
269.832.8353
alyssa.jones@mihin.org