Earlier this week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Published the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement for Health Information Networks. The framework lays out the principles that should guide the standards of health information sharing while the common agreement focuses more on the infrastructure and governance of exchanging data.
The structure, developed with stakeholders within the healthcare community, will allow different types of networks to exchange information more freely because there will be an agreed upon set of rules that should make data formats consistent across organizations.
This isn’t to say that organizations aren’t sharing data now, but it can be a cumbersome process for all involved. If organizations are receiving lab results from an out of town patient, large referral packets, or updates from a community care location, the data is quite regularly received as a fax or image file, which means the data will have to be entered manually.
An option for organizations that have the resources is to create interfaces with places like labs that send them data. This solution can be effective if there are a limited number of places that send you data, but it’s not practical to have interfaces with scores of outside providers due to cost, time, and information technology constraints.
The release of this larger framework is another step along the path laid out by the 21st Century Cures Act. After this step, organizations will be able to apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network, which will allow easy data sharing amongst all other members. The nice thing about having a common framework like this is that it provides benefits across the healthcare continuum. Not only will hospitals be able to share more freely with public health agencies and health information networks, but patients will also be able to have a more comprehensive view of their healthcare information.
In addition to the framework and common agreement, the ONC also released a roadmap for HL7-FHIR that will help with the adoption of these standards, allowing more organizations to participate in quick and easy data exchange.
That concept of adoption will certainly be the one to pay most attention to. With a well-organized set of rules, it can make a lot of sense for organizations to join, but we’ll need to snowball toward a critical mass of implementation to really see the interoperability benefits.
In the meantime, and if we assume that there will be some long-term holdouts to making their data more shareable, there are solutions like Extract’s HealthyData Platform that can take all of the manual work off your plate, giving you better data faster. Our software takes your incoming documents, determines what they are, then grabs all of the data you’d want from that type of file, and inputs it into a patient medical record, DMS, anywhere you’d like really. In the spirit of data consistency and interoperability, we also take the data on these documents and change the naming conventions to make sure they match what’s in your systems.
If you’d like to see a demonstration of how we do this, or just have a short introductory call, please reach out.
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.