When are we going to accept the fact that "the Feds" already pay for the majority of healthcare (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, DoD, federal/state employee coverage, grants...) They could change it overnight by changing reimbursements...
If the customer is always right, then the customer is always 'wrong' when the customer does not demand interoperability. The CIO moniker should stand for Chief Integration Officer, and he/she should demand interop as part of an ironclad contract. Vendors just follow the money, buyers can put it wherever they want, but must have the moxie to do just that. Till they do they are their own worst enemy.
The correct answer is not listed and the five optional poll answers are each irrelevant. The reason there is anemic interoperability of patient data is simple: because fee for service healthcare inherently recognizes interoperability of patient data as an unreimbursed cost. Healthcare professionals share data when they have a business reason to do so (quoting Shirky & Diamond, Health Affairs, 2008). Let's assume for discussion purposes that the business model of health care migrates away from fee for service and instead reimburses collaboration among separate care team members to achieve quality heath outcomes on a per patient basis. As it turns out, quality measurement is suboptimal in the isolation of one provider seeing one patient using one EHR. Instead, quality measures done right (e.g., tracking data points over time and across multiple care settings) is a collaborative team sport that will require pervasive interoperability among dissimilar clinical computing environments. Punishing doctors or EHR software vendors today for failing to share patient data is a waste of time - it's just blaming the victim rather than looking at root causes. Let's stop deluding ourselves with the unsupported notion that imposing certification requirements for data exchange features on EHR vendors will magically cause patient data to be exchanged.
When are we going to accept the fact that "the Feds" already pay for the majority of healthcare (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, DoD, federal/state employee coverage, grants...) They could change it overnight by changing reimbursements...
If the customer is always right, then the customer is always 'wrong' when the customer does not demand interoperability. The CIO moniker should stand for Chief Integration Officer, and he/she should demand interop as part of an ironclad contract. Vendors just follow the money, buyers can put it wherever they want, but must have the moxie to do just that. Till they do they are their own worst enemy.
The correct answer is not listed and the five optional poll answers are each irrelevant. The reason there is anemic interoperability of patient data is simple: because fee for service healthcare inherently recognizes interoperability of patient data as an unreimbursed cost. Healthcare professionals share data when they have a business reason to do so (quoting Shirky & Diamond, Health Affairs, 2008). Let's assume for discussion purposes that the business model of health care migrates away from fee for service and instead reimburses collaboration among separate care team members to achieve quality heath outcomes on a per patient basis. As it turns out, quality measurement is suboptimal in the isolation of one provider seeing one patient using one EHR. Instead, quality measures done right (e.g., tracking data points over time and across multiple care settings) is a collaborative team sport that will require pervasive interoperability among dissimilar clinical computing environments. Punishing doctors or EHR software vendors today for failing to share patient data is a waste of time - it's just blaming the victim rather than looking at root causes. Let's stop deluding ourselves with the unsupported notion that imposing certification requirements for data exchange features on EHR vendors will magically cause patient data to be exchanged.