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Viewing patient data as a commercial asset hinders health IT interoperability

January 22, 2020

What’s more, a federal government entity, ONC, is tasked with advancing connectivity and interoperability of health IT on a national basis, via the Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA). ONC’s current standards initiative, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), “is designed to scale electronic health information exchange nationwide and help ensure that [healthcare networks], health care providers, health plans, individuals, and many more stakeholders have secure access to their electronic health information when and where it is needed.”

For now, the interoperability landscape remains cluttered and confusing. Where interoperability currently exists, it is usually within a healthcare network -- but even that is limited. A survey by the Center for Connected Medicine of technology executives at U.S. hospitals and health systems found that nearly a third say their data-sharing efforts are insufficient, even within their own organizations, and fewer than four in 10 say they are successfully sharing health care data with other health systems.

There are several industry initiatives seeking to advance interoperability, including the CommonWell Health Alliance, and the Sequoia Project and its offspring, Carequality and the eHealth Exchange. There also are local and regional HIE entities taking incremental steps to extend their reach. For example, Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services recently announced it will integrate Great Lakes Health Connect, a Michigan-based health information exchange by the end of the year. And New Bedford, Mass.-based Southcoast Health System joined the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health information exchange program to streamline the sharing of patients' medical records between the two organizations.

But nationally, there’s a long way to go to achieve the Holy Grail of ubiquitous EHR systems interoperability and ready patient data access that would be so valuable to patients and clinicians.

What will it take to achieve this? For starters, a culture of collaboration instead of competition, among both health IT vendors and provider organizations.

Easy to say; hard to do. It requires a mindset of putting patients first, and an acceptance that patient data is not primarily a commercial asset to be hoarded and siloed. Rather, it is a clinical asset for individual patient care, as well as for population health research and analysis, which can be applied to developing a deeper understanding of illnesses and how to anticipate and treat them.

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