According to the new JASON group report called “Data for Individual Health” a learning health system is needed to connect the medical system with broader societal inputs to link health and wellness to healthcare. EHRs and PHRs play an important role but there is still a level of data access, integration, and scalability that goes well beyond the interoperability of EHR systems that needs to focus specifically on the health of individuals.
Findings in the JASON report show that there have been numerous reports regarding healthcare information and all agree that there is a need for greater interoperability and data integration. However, with the explosion of data from many sources, there is little understanding of how to parse, analyze, evaluate, merge, and move the data on individuals to the healthcare team.
Also, pilot projects are emerging to encourage intra-community partnering to create healthier environments for citizens but unfortunately metrics are lacking that are greatly needed to provide a reliable index of community health.
To add to the problem, healthcare teams are growing in size and diversity of expertise. The effectiveness of such teams will critically depend on intra-team communications enabled by access to data. A higher level of literacy will be required by team members to make informed health decisions from the growing body of health-relevant data and analytics.
As expressed by the team at ONC, efforts are now underway such as the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps www.countyhealthrankings.org acting as a guide to help community leaders set priorities to improve health. With access to more data, communities will be able to make faster and smarter decisions to support health.
The report was done in partnership with AHRQ www.ahrq.gov, the National Coordinator for HIT www.healthit.gov, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation www.rwjf.org. On December 8th, ONC released the new draft Federal Health IT Strategic Plan for 2015-2020 that includes five goals. ONC is also working on a shared nationwide interoperability roadmap.
Go to http://healthit.ahrq.gov/sites/defaqult/files/docs/publication/2014-jason-data-for-individual-health.pdf to view the new JASON report.