The American Medical Informatics Association has released the findings from a new paper addressing health IT policy, including recommendation on how policymakers can support patient access to health data, interoperability for clinicians and patient care-related research and innovation.
As the group accurately notes, the US healthcare system has transformed itself into a digital industry at astonishing speed, largely during the past five years. Nonetheless, many healthcare organizations haven’t unlocked the value of these new tools, in part because their technical infrastructure is largely a collection of disparate systems which don’t work together well.
The paper, which is published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, offers several policy recommendations intended to help health IT better support value-based health, care and research. The paper argues that governments should implement specific policy to:
- Enable patients to have better access to clinical data by standardizing data flow
- Improve access to patient-generated data compiled by mHealth apps and related technologies
- Engage patients in research by improving ways to alert clinicians and patients about research opportunities, while seeing to it that researchers manage consent effectively
- Enable patient participation in and contribution to care delivery and health management by harmonizing standards for various classes of patient-generated data
- Improve interoperability using APIs, which may demand that policymakers require adherence to chosen data standards
- Develop and implement a documentation-simplification framework to fuel an overhaul of quality measurement, ensure availability of coded EHRs clinical data and support reimbursement requirements redesign
- Develop and implement an app-vetting process emphasizing safety and effectiveness, to include creating a knowledgebase of trusted sources, possibly as part of clinical practice improvement under MIPS
- Create a policy framework for research and innovation, to include policies to aid data access for research conducted by HIPAA-covered entities and increase needed data standardization
- Foster an ecosystem connecting safe, effective and secure health applications
To meet these goals, AMIA issued a set of “Policy Action Items” which address immediate, near-term and future policy initiatives. They include:
- Clarifying a patient’s HIPAA “right to access” to include a right to all data maintained by a covered entity’s designated record set;
- Encourage continued adoption of 2015 Edition Certified Health IT, which will allow standards-based APIs published in the public domain to be composed of standard features which can continue to be deployed by providers; and
- Make effective Common Rule revisions as finalized in the January 19, 2017 issue of the Federal Register
In looking at this material, I noted with interest AMIA’s thinking on the appropriate premises for current health IT policy. The group offered some worthwhile suggestions on how health IT leaders can leverage health data effectively, such as giving patients easy access to their mHealth data and engaging them in the research process.
Given that they overlap with suggestions I’ve seen elsewhere, we may be getting somewhere as an industry. In fact, it seems to me that we’re approaching industry consensus on some issues which, despite seeming relatively straightforward have been the subject of professional disputes.
As I see it, AMIA stands as good a chance as any other healthcare entity at getting these policies implemented. I look forward to seeing how much progress it makes in drawing attention to these issues.
