Healthcare data interoperability and open skies: At last some help from the government!

 

The ONC and CMS proposed a new interoperability regulation in February of this year, and it seems to be a game-changer for patients, providers, and software companies like ours. It's better late than never given that the federal government has spent tens of billions of dollars attempting to convince healthcare providers to jump on the electronic health record (EHR) bandwagon with, at best, dubious outcomes. Here is my perspective as the CEO of a newly founded clinical decision support company that will profit from the rule once it is put into place.

When I founded Inferscience, I had the goal of integrating with EHRs, analyzing the patient data in the record, and giving the doctor sound, evidence-based suggestions or guidelines for the patient's care. The fact that providers take a lot of time to enter data into EHRs is well known. Some of my medical colleagues spend more time entering data than they do care for patients. One would therefore hope that patient data serves purposes other than protecting them from legal action and enabling their employer to charge the greatest possible amount. Sadly, that is not the case. EHRs haven't put much effort into analyzing patient data to aid doctors in raising the standard of medical treatment. They have made the issue worse.

We are aware that patients do not receive the best care up to 60% of the time. One of the key causes is that many healthcare professionals lack the time and expertise necessary to provide patients with the proper care. That, in my view, is a travesty in this day and age of pervasive knowledge access. By requiring EHRs to share their data via APIs with third-party applications of the patient's or provider's choosing, the interoperability rule aims to change that. Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, enable various apps to communicate with one another and share data, which should help address many of the constraints of current EHR systems. It's comparable to having access to a vast selection of apps in an app store. However, the EHR will be needed to interchange data with a variety of systems, even those belonging to a prospective competitor, unlike apps that have been developed for a particular mobile or desktop operating system. This is because the patient and his or her provider will own the data and have the last say over it.

Once the law is in place, it should inspire software designers to create tools that help healthcare organizations freely communicate data while also enabling providers to raise their clinical game. Because the apps will assist them in providing better medical care more effectively, it should also result in higher provider satisfaction. Additional HCC medicare risk adjustment advantages include, among others, the ability to access patient data from other EHRs, specialty-specific advanced clinical decision support, automated risk-capturing tools, notifications when a patient is admitted to the hospital, simple access to clinical registries, and real medication reconciliation. And the revolution in consumer access to data and insights into their health that the rule offers is not even mentioned in this list. The new patient and provider-centric ecosystems made possible by the interoperability rule ought to result in more effective and economical medical care since doctors will be able to concentrate on what really matters: improving patients' lives.

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