As a supporter of interoperability in the healthcare marketplace, helping to pave “the last mile” of interoperability, Electronic Health Information (EHI) flow is a critical component of our mission.
Critical to EHI flow is the need for health care entities (Payors, Providers, EMR companies, third party developers, etc.) to “play nice” in the EHI exchange “sand box.” To support that notion, Congress wrote rulesets into the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act). These rulesets establish what must be shared as well as what exceptions to data sharing are carved out.
From the ONC website: In 2016, the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) made sharing electronic health information the expected norm in health care by authorizing the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to identify "reasonable and necessary activities that do not constitute information blocking." ONC's 2020 Cures Act Final Rule established information blocking exceptions to implement the law.
Recently, JAMIA (A Scholarly Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine) published a journal article, “Experiences with information blocking in the United States: a national survey of hospitals,” penned by Jordan Everson, Daniel Healy, and Vaishali Patel. The objective of the study was “…to describe hospital leaders’ perceptions of the prevalence of practices that may constitute information blocking, by actor and hospital characteristics, following the rule’s applicability date.” Their article essentially establishes a baseline of sorts as to how the Cures Act is affecting EHI flow in the marketplace. The author’s findings:
42% of hospitals reported observing some behavior they perceived to be information blocking.
36% of responding hospitals perceived that healthcare providers either sometimes or often engaged in practices that may constitute information blocking.
17% perceived that health IT developers (such as EHR developers) either sometimes or often engaged in practices that may constitute information blocking.
19% perceived State, regional and/or local health information exchanges either sometimes or often engaged in practices that may constitute information blocking.
These findings support the notion that the Cures Act is positively impacting EHI exchange. It also supports the notion that there is improvement needed to get to the ultimate goal of the Cures Act. To establish an EHI exchange that is free of self-interested blocking behaviors by some health care entities. We look forward to that goal’s achievement.
In the meantime, Extract will continue to automate the intake of healthcare's difficult unstructured documents so the most complete and accurate information will be available for clinicians.
About the Author: Norm Kruse
Norm is a Business Development Manager with experience in Healthcare and Telecommunications technologies. He earned his BS – Business Administration at Winona State University and his MBA – IT Concentration at the Carlson School of Business at the University of Minnesota. Technology applied to workflow design is a focused area of interest.