The surge in telehealth use amid the pandemic has shown that interoperability is one of the biggest challenges to deliver high-quality healthcare. Healthcare professionals need interoperable patient data to deliver targeted care and communication between providers is critical for patient data exchange. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) defines interoperability as “the ability…
The term “social determinants of health” (SDOH) refers to the factors outside of traditional care that impact a patient’s health, such as “the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work, and age”. Improvements in overall health metrics are likely to depend on the attention being paid to these social determinants Healthcare organizations…
American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Patient ID Day will be held on Wednesday, March 24th, 2021. Join AHIMA on that day as HIM members reach out to Members of Congress asking them to support a national strategy around patient identification and to repeal Section 510 in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill. What exactly is patient identification? Patient…
In March 2019, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a Proposed Rule, 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking, and the ONC Health IT Certification Program and released a final Rule in March 2020, published in the Federal Register on May 1, 2020. Compliance for the Information Blocking provisions…
It’s time to get out the crystal ball and share some thoughts on what to expect for healthcare in 2021. In 2021, there will be a higher expectation for information sharing. The pandemic has shown that there is a willingness to share personal data when the benefits are clearly communicated. The growth in the amount…
Application programing interfaces (APIs) are a set of standards that govern how software applications interact with each other. APIs are essential in health care data exchange, whether for data analytics, research, or creating new ways to access electronic health records (EHR.) APIs are needed when two software components interact, whether in an operating system or…
“A master patient index (MPI) is an index of known patients within a single organization whose visits are linked together by a single identifier, typically the medical record number. MPI management activities typically pertain to a software application that identifies, coordinates, and lists database information. Enterprise MPI (EMPI) combines MPIs of two or more organizations.…
Healthcare data is collected to improve the cost and quality of healthcare. But this leads to the question of how to incorporate data of different quality and accessibility, as the data is usually sourced from a wide variety of systems used within administrative and clinical systems. Interoperability between administrative and clinical systems offers the opportunity…
Information blocking is “a practice by a health IT developer of certified health IT, health information network, health information exchange, or health care provider that, except as required by law or specified by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a reasonable and necessary activity, is likely to interfere with access, exchange, or…
On July 15, 2020, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield and United States Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Chief Information Officer Jose Arrieta provided an update for members of the media on HHS efforts to gather and disseminate real-time hospital data on COVID-19. In short, rather than requiring hospitals…