Device Interoperability Effort Seeks Hospital Leaders

Center for Medical Interoperability, funded by the Gary and Mary West Foundation, aims to solve incompatibilities between medical devices and health IT systems.

The Gary and Mary West Foundation has provided initial grant funding to the new Center for Medical Interoperability. A nonprofit, hospital-led entity, the center was formed to spearhead the development of standards-based technical solutions that allow data sharing among medical devices and enterprise health IT systems. The center will use personnel and royalty-free technology licensed from the West Health Institute, a nonprofit medical research arm of the foundation that seeks to lower health costs.

The West Health Institute, which has also served as an incubator for and investor in mobile health app firms, has been trying to raise awareness of the medical device interoperability issue for the past year and a half. Last March, the institute released a report asserting that improving interoperability among devices and EHRs could save more than $30 billion a year while improving patient care and safety.