On February 12, 2019 during HIMSS 2019 Conference, the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC), https://www.hlc.org a coalition of CEOs from all disciplines within American healthcare, and the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), https://bipartisanpolicy.org, a non-profit organization, released a new report recommending public and private sections actions to advance health IT interoperability.
The HLC and BPC report outlines how the public and private sectors can work together to improve the flow of patients and their health information across different technology systems and care settings. This will not only improve care but will also support individuals in managing their health and healthcare.
The report recommends:
- Improving the business case for interoperability through collaboration among payers and providers, as well as providers and their health IT vendors,
- Implementing shared expectations for interoperability in the form of model contract language or other mechanisms
- Strengthening the technical infrastructure for interoperability by adopting common, baseline standards to improve patient matching across systems, pursuing rapid adoption of HL7 FHIR® Application Programming Interfaces (API) to accelerate information sharing and prioritizing, and testing for interoperability in future ONC Health IT Certification Program requirements
- Voluntarily adopting a common “notice of information access” and aligning consent policies for substance use disorder treatment as well as state privacy laws with HIPAA so it will be easier for individuals and providers to gain access to data
- Expanding public and private collaboration to measure interoperability progress and develop and executing private sector actions to drive improvements
The report titled, “Advancing Interoperability, Information Sharing, and Data Access: Improving Health and Healthcare for Americans” is available on the BPC website https://bipartisanpolicy.org