In this video, Paul L Wilder, Executive Director of the CommonWell Health Alliance, discusses the spread of health data exchange as it involves not just providers but new actors such as payers, public health, and patients themselves.
CommonWell, a nonprofit QHIN that started in 2013 and has an enormous reach today, contains IT vendors ranging from startups to big EHR vendors, and providers now as well. For a long time, Wilder says, EHRs supported only unidirectional data exchange: they would allow it to be extracted but not inserted. Now it’s more bidirectional.
While CommonWell is still investing in and supporting FHIR, Wilder noted that the ability of AI to extract key data from plain text documents, and to convert data between formats, makes the FHIR standard less important. Many sites go from source document to their own storage without an intermediate FHIR step.
However, FHIR is valuable for segmenting data and extracting just a few fields. This is important in public health, because transferring complete records on huge numbers of patients creates the security risk of a “honeypot” that could attract attackers.
In contrast, most providers want complete records. Patients do too, although Wilder suggests that in a few cases (such as private notes created by psychotherapists) the provider might be without some data. In our discussion, Wilder describes patients’ interest in their data, and advises that at the very least, they should examine their data for errors.
Wilder also discusses the benefits and challenges of two recent government policies: TEFCA and CMS-aligned networks. One observation he made is that TEFCA applies to covered entities, and thus excludes some important institutions such as free clinics. He also noted that CMS-aligned networks require bilateral agreements, which is very cumbersome to arrange among large groups of institutions.
However, some institutions have vastly increased data exchanges through TEFCA, and therefore increased the number of documents by orders of magnitude. For instance, more errors are being reported to the government because it’s technically easier to report the data. Some providers say they’re getting too much data, but Wilder has little sympathy for that complaint. He did suggest that as the volume of documents increases, it’s also easier for malicious breaches to get lost and go unnoticed. That’s a challenge that the industry is going to have to work on.
Check out our interview with Paul Wilder from CommonWell to learn more about the latest on healthcare interopeability.
Learn more about CommenWell Health Alliance: https://www.commonwellalliance.org/
Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.
And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.
Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.
CommonWell Health Alliance is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment