Healthcare Data Needs Context
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Healthcare alliance says EHR vendors must move away from 'locked' proprietary systems.
In response to a request for input by the Senate Finance Committee, the Premier healthcare alliance has recommended several strategies to improve the utility of health data.
Premier Inc., a healthcare alliance of 3,000 hospitals and 110,000 other providers, warned the Senate Finance Committee that the government’s efforts to bring transparency to the healthcare market by releasing data needs context to have value for consumers.
In the Aug. 18 letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Blair Childs, Premier's senior VP of public affairs, called for electronic health record vendors to be required to use open application programming interfaces (APIs) to improve interoperability, rather than "locked" proprietary systems.
“Today the HIT/EHR systems are ‘locked’ away in proprietary systems, which hinders their ability to connect and exchange information with other systems, medical devices, and sensors along the care continuum, from the emergency room to the clinic and to the intensive care unit, for instance,” states the letter. “Requiring open APIs as a foundational and integral standard for healthcare data would reverse the current legacy state of locked systems and enable bi-directional and real time exchange of health data currently residing in Electronic Medical Record (EMR)/EHR systems.”
"[I]t may be necessary for the Office of the National Coordinator to lead, through government action, by requiring open APIs for data elements in the EHRs to be interoperable. It is essential that we move as quickly as possible to open APIs," the letter states.
While noting that it has long promoted transparency in the healthcare industry, Premier cautioned senators that the “broad release of provider payment data, without proper context, explanation and linkages to quality and other factors, can lead to incomplete and inaccurate conclusions by patients and other users.” To empower patients to make educated decisions about their healthcare, the alliance urged lawmakers to “ensure that publicly-available data is accurate and actionable and will appropriately drive patients to higher quality and more efficient care.”
Premier also recommends that qualified researchers should have access to clinical data from EHRs, the government should allow publicly funded data to be de-identified pursuant to HIPAA for research, and that there should be expanded efforts to incentivize interoperability, as well as inclusion of behavioral health, home health and long-term care data.