Currently, when healthcare data moves in this country it does it using fax machines and patient sneaker-nets. Automated digital interoperability is still in its earliest stages, mostly it has a history of being actively resisted by both the EHR vendors and large healthcare providers. We, as an industry, should be doing better, and our failure to do so is felt everyday by patients across the country.
The ONC-defined difference between EHRs and EMRs is that EHRs are interoperable. Yet, as I have said before, we have spent almost a billions of dollars and generally gotten EMRs instead of EHRs.
Comments were due Apr 3 for the ONC Interoperability Roadmap for 2015-2020. This was specifically separated out from the overall ONC Health IT Strategic Plan for which comments have closed.
Both of these plans ignore the lessons in execution from the previous strategic plan for health IT from ONC. The current Interoperability Roadmap mentions the “NwHIN” (Nationwide Health Information Network) for instance, and only covers what it accomplished, which are mostly policy successes like the DURSA (Data Use and Reciprocal Support Agreement). NwHIN was supposed to be a network of networks that connected every provider in the country… why hasn’t that happened?
ONC has forgotten what the actual ambition was in 2010. It was not to create cool policy documents. The plan 5 years ago was to have the “interoperability problem” solved in 5 years. The plan 5 years before that was probably to solve the problem in 5 years. Apparently, our policy makers look at interoperability and say “wow this is a big problem, we need at least 5 years to solve it”. Without any sense of ironic awareness that this is what they have been saying for decades, even before Kolodner was the ONC.
