From our friend John Lynn in Hospital and EHR:
“In all the reporting around meaningful use being replaced (or as many mis-reported meaningful use ending), Andy Slavitt also made a number of other points in his talk at JP Morgan’s Healthcare conference. Much like he did with meaningful use, he live tweeted his talk. Here were a couple of his non-meaningful use tweets that stood out to me.”
Andy, and John in response, offer some interesting thoughts here on interoperability and data blocking by EHR vendors.
John quotes athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, who said “Interoperability should not be used as a point of competition.”
We agree with this statement as it pertains to EHR vendors, as it was intended. However, one area that we think interoperability can be used as a competitive advantage is for hospitals, clinics and health systems.
So much focus of interoperability is on the EHR vendors, yet so few report on the progress providers have made in data sharing.
If pundits were to be believed, no data is being shared due to the greedy EHR vendors. That notion, however, is absolutely false. Every day we see our provider customers take control of the health data produced within their IT environments and improve operations and workflow, integrate systems internally, and send and receive data with outside providers and vendors with ease.
While we agree with Andy and John that improvements should be made on the vendor level, we also think it’s time for the industry to recognize that forward-thinking systems, hospitals and clinics are charging forward and making interoperability happen!
