Throughout the pandemic, public health departments have been under a level of stress that most of their employees haven’t seen in their entire careers. Not only that, but there’s also a spotlight being shined on them, amplifying both good and bad decision making.
The ONC’s Health Information Technology Committee (HITAC) conducted a hearing focusing on public health systems’ interoperability during the pandemic. What came out of the discussion is that there are interoperability flaws that exist between the various levels of public health organizations, from the local ones going up to the federal level.
While there’s obviously a close focus on how data can be shared between healthcare providers and public health agencies, the hearing also brought up issues of how ancillary data, such as the kind you’d find in economic, political, or faith-based systems could be used to create a more comprehensive look at patients and be better informed regarding population health insights.
To accomplish this, organizations will have to embrace open standards of data use versus proprietary ones and adopt more modern forms of technology. The pandemic caught a lot of groups off guard, and they were forced to rely on spreadsheets while building the infrastructure they needed in parallel.
Some interoperability upgrades have been dictated by necessity, but legislation is ensuring that progress will continue. We’ve written about the Cures Act and its info blocking provisions that will bring new levels of data accessibility to patients and providers, regardless of an outside force like a pandemic creating a need.
When we hear things like these panelists saying that certain groups’ data processing capabilities are outdated, our ears perk up. Without developments like national patient identifiers and the ability for any one medical record system to easily exchange information with another, Extract likes to come in to pick up the slack.
Whether it’s a public health agency or a hospital, no healthcare organization is going to receive all of their data in a fully interfaced, hands-free way. Faxes, scans, and even paper all still arrive at healthcare organizations every day with data that needs to be keyed into a health record, orders that need to be matched, patients that need to be identified, and images that need to make it to a DMS.
Our HealthyData platform takes care of all of that, automatically reading the document, classifying it, retrieving the data you want, confirming information, matching encounters, and delivering the data and documents wherever you need.
Give us a call or send us a message and we’d be happy to show you how it works.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.