Interoperability

If it makes it through the Senate and the president, the amendment to HR 2740 could finally clear the way for big progress in matching the right data to the right patients.

The future of healthcare lies outside of the hospital. Getting there requires better standards, and deeply integrated clinical decision support at all levels.

The firm says hospitals and health systems should be preparing themselves to take advantage of distributed ledger technology, AI, augmented reality and quantum computing.

The partnership aims to expand secure identity matching so care teams have seamless access to medical records.

In its comments on the agencies' interoperability rules, HIMSS said FHIR v.4 should be required for certification – but cautioned against too broad a definition of EHI and said to slow requirements for payer trusted exchange network participation.

The RESTful application programming interface can support HL7, CCDA, RDBMS, CSV and X12 for data extraction and aggregation into a standardized format.

The retailer joins other big players such as AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and Pfizer in the effort to use distributed ledger technology for medication safety and integrity.

The Medical Group Management Association also has concerns about security risks that might be associated with the proposed rules, and says they go "too far, too fast."

Jeff Coughlin, senior director of Federal and State Affairs at HIMSS, discusses information-blocking, interoperability, social determinants and recently proposed rules from CMS and ONC.

The members of the HIMSS EHR Association support the rules' goals – but say that as drafted they go beyond Congress' intent for 21st Century Cures, are too loosely defined, have too tight a timeline and require too much IP sharing.