The Global Center for Health Innovation in Cleveland, Ohio, opened its doors Tuesday. A four-story, 235,000-square-foot building, the Global Center aims to be a venue for vendors and organizations to showcase the best of health IT.
The Global Center is supported by influential healthcare organizations in Cleveland, including Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals, as well as Cardinal Health, Cisco Systems, Foundation Medical Partners, GE HealthCare Systems, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Philips Healthcare and BioEnterprise.
"The Global Center provides a place for leaders and decision-makers to find the latest innovations," says Kevin Ziegler, a spokesman for the Center. "When they're looking for new ideas, we want this to be the place they think of."
Each floor of the Global Center has a dedicated theme — the first floor is Health and Home, the second is People, Patients and Caregivers, the third is Clinical Spaces and the top floor is dedicated to Health IT — the entirety of which has been leased to the Health Information Management Systems Society.
HIMSS expects 100,000 visitors during the first year, says Mr. Ziegler. The highlight of HIMSS' floor will be the interoperability showcase, he says. The showcase is designed to provide a realistic testing environment for inventors and tech developers to see how their product would work in different environments. "The HIMSS space is designed to simulate those real-world conditions, so they have an idea of what they need to do to finish the product so they can get it on the market," says Mr. Ziegler.
For HIMSS, hosting the interoperability showcase at the Global Center seemed like a natural next step. "HIMSS had been considering this kind of innovation center for a number of years," says Sandra Vance, senior director of interoperability initiatives at HIMSS. "When the Center came to fruition with all this public support, it made sense to come in."
HIMSS' showcase and testing environments are designed to be a catalyst for both innovation and education. "We want to help vendors improve their systematic compliance and develop products that will improve care," says Ms. Vance. "We also want to educate stakeholders on healthcare policy by creating an environment where they can come in and see how the technology works."
The space will also be beneficial to healthcare organizations in making vendor selections, says Ms. Vance. Citing upcoming meaningful use requirements for patient data exchange that necessitate interoperability, she says finding the right systems and products has proven challenging for providers. "It's impossible to test or show this functionality on-site with just one system," she says. "You can't test interoperability between system A and system B without system B."
On the top floor of the Global Center, however, HIMSS offers a variety of vendors' systems so healthcare organizations can see and test interoperability among them. Vendors can also take the opportunity to ensure products' interoperability and then demonstrate that functionality to providers at the Global Center or through an online virtualization of the interoperability showcase.
"This space is designed to enable solutions providers to work collaboratively and not competitively," says Ms. Vance, helping to ensure the best products come to the market and are adopted by healthcare organizations. "We're really working to make this a worldwide hub for health IT innovation."
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