Jan 11
2016
Interoperability for Real; It’s Finally Here
Guest post by Sanjeev Agrawal, president, LeanTaaS Healthcare.
Interoperability will be healthcare IT’s biggest trend in 2016 as the industry finally sees momentous forward movement.
In fact, interoperability is not a new trend. It has been an important mission (and a challenge) for healthcare administrators for decades, but the past couple of years have been game-changing:
- First, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) wants interoperability to be a common feature in all EHRs by 2024 so that patient data can be shared across systems to provide better care at a lower cost. Since the 2009 passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), a $30 billion initiative to accelerate EHR adoption, more than 433,000 professionals (95 percent of eligible hospitals and 60 percent of eligible professionals in Medicare and Medicaid programs) have received incentive payments.
- Second, the HHS’s ambitious announcement that mandates moving 50 percent of Medicare payments from fee-for-service-based to value-based alternatives by 2018 puts care coordination and interoperability at center stage. This historic initiative is transformational for patient-centered care based on accountability and outcomes and is the first step toward achieving better health overall with lower cost.
- Third, there’s been significant industry momentum with more than 40 organizations coming together to work on HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource), dubbed “Project Argonaut,” an industry-wide effort to create a modern API and data services sharing between the EHR and other healthcare IT systems based on Internet standards and architectural patterns. Project Argonaut began in December 2014 and has made impressive progress. And while still evolving, the recently released Stage 3 meaningful use rules have emphasized interoperability — more than 60 percent of the proposed measures require interoperability, up from 33 percent in Stage 2.