Another week, another healthcare communications platform — but this one might be different from most of the others.

Monday, McKesson Health Solutions, a Newton, Massachusetts-based division of McKesson Corp., introduced the McKesson Intelligence Hub, an interoperability system that focuses on reimbursement and payment.

It’s distinct from the company’s RelayHealth, which helps healthcare organizations share clinical data. It’s not like newly funded startup Klara, the latest in a line of clinical messaging platforms, and it’s unlike Salesforce Health Cloud, NantHealth and SAP Connected Health, which can support genomics. Those are all made for providers, whereas the McKesson Intelligence Hub is targeting the payer market, according to Amy Larsson, vice president of clinical claims management at McKesson Health Solutions.

Instead, the McKesson Intelligence Hub connects various reimbursement-related technologies from McKesson and other vendors, based on open standards such as Health Level Seven International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). The cloud-based hub is backed by identity/access management as well as by management of application programming interfaces to third-party applications.

“This is to support value-based care,” explained Larsson, a registered nurse. “This is a fundamental component.”

The system connects payer networks to providers and payment systems, breaking down data silos and helping to streamline authorization, claims submission and payments, Larsson said.

“To make [value-based reimbursement] work, we must achieve interoperability at scale—and that means across payer, provider and vendor lines,” Larsson wrote in a white paper supplied to MedCity News. “We must unlock these silos and shift to true healthcare interoperability if we are ever to realize the long-sought- after goals of higher-quality care delivery; and better outcomes for patients in an efficient, cost-effective healthcare system.”

She said she has been fighting to knock down data silos for 25 years. Only now is she realizing her dream.

If the technology works properly, it should pay for itself, Larsson said. “As you create these interoperable platforms, you naturally take waste out of the system,” she said.

McKesson Health Solutions is a unit of McKesson Technology Solutions, which the parent company is spinning off into a new, yet-unnamed venture with Change Healthcare Holdings of Nashville, Tennessee. Timing of that deal is unclear now that the U.S. Department of Justice has asked McKesson and Change Healthcare for more information about the transaction as part of a routine antitrust review, but the plan is for the Intellegence Hub to become part of the new company.

Editorial Note: A previous version of the story included a quote from an executive about software capability but she misspoke. That capability doesn’t exist. 

Photo: Flickr user Tsahi Levent-Levi