Health care has a problem. Well, of course, it has many problems, but one of them is that the various parties involved in the health care system can't agree on who we are. Twenty years ago HIPAA called for creation of unique patient identifiers to accomplish this task, but within two years Congress put this on hold until further notice, and we're still waiting. Everyone used to use social security numbers for this purpose, until we finally figured out the folly of that (especially since that number was never intended to be used as a national identification number). The private sector continues to clamor for federal action, while CHIME launched a National Patient ID Challenge in order to come up with solutions. News flash; we already have a unique, non-government-issued identifier: it's called a cell phone number...
patient identification
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Allscripts, Cerner, Epic Signal More Open EHRs Ahead
Top executives at three electronic health record companies — Allscripts, Cerner and Epic — revealed that they're working to make their EHRs more open. That means embracing APIs as a means to enable third-parties to write software and apps that run on their platforms... Allscripts CEO Paul Black said publishing APIs that third parties can use to create apps for its platform "is a big deal" and, in fact, the company has some 5,000 developers certified to do just that: Some 2 billion API data exchanges have been conducted on its platform since 2013...
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Halamka on Enabling Nationwide Interoperability
...recently, the ONC Interoperability Roadmap, recognizing that the building blocks of universal interoperability could not be so neatly erected, leans on the idea of “coordinated governance” of networks. While these frameworks have paid homage to the concept of nationwide network as a “network of networks”, we have yet to crisply define the stitching needed to form this nationwide network quilt. This issue hasn’t been so pressing up until now because there were relatively few networks – the “last mile” problem was the bigger concern. Network formation is evolving rapidly, however, which has made more pressing the question of what it means to connect networks in a uniform way.
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Infographic: The Impact Of Duplicate Medical Records In Healthcare
The rise of duplicate medical records is growing exponentially in the healthcare industry as more hospitals using EHRs share information through Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Read More »
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No Thanks, I Already Have a Number
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The 128-Byte Data Field That Could Save Lives And Billions Of Dollars
I can easily think of 5 articles that highlight the extraordinary waste and cost of the U.S. healthcare system. [...] The PwC report concluded that about $1.2 trillion was wasted – each year. Here’s how PwC further categorized that waste... Read More »
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Why Your Organization Can’t Afford To Skimp On Interoperability Anymore
Interoperability is a key enabler for providers and payers to deliver on the promise of health care reform. Despite increased adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs), only a fraction of providers can demonstrate the routine ability to exchange data efficiently, prompting public criticism of the application software vendors as a barrier to achieving interoperability objectives. Recognizing that interoperability is essential, the Office of the National Coordinator released an interoperability road map intended to drive the market toward a common data set for easier data exchange.
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