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Organizations Face Several Health Data Interoperability Hurdles

There are four main hurdles regarding health data interoperability, Patrick Getzen, senior vice president and chief data and analytics officer at BCBSNC, told an August 21 HHS panel.

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Source: HHS

By Fred Donovan

- There are four main hurdles regarding health data interoperability, Patrick Getzen, senior vice president and chief data and analytics officer at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC), told an August 21 panel at the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's Third Interoperability Forum being held in Washington, DC.

These four hurdles are the need to standardize data, move data faster, improve data quality, and determine data ownership.

“The data we are exchanging is not standardized. We are creating customized data extracts for our providers. As a result, there is a lot of infrastructure costs and labor costs,” Getzen said.

“Second, we need to have interoperability that enables the data to move faster between the parties that are exchanging the data. We need to get to a point where clinicians are getting data they can use in care delivery,” he said.

“Data quality is the third thing we have to focus on. There are not consistent processes for certifying data as high quality. If the data is not trusted between data exchange partners, it won’t be used effectively,” he added.

“The last piece is clarifying the roles and responsibilities around who owns this data once it’s been exchanged. If I send claims data to a provider and I get clinical data back from that provider, what’s appropriate for the use of that data? Who is responsible for tracking consent authorization?” Getzen said.

“Those are the kinds of things we are looking at to make our providers and partners more successful,” he added.

Morgan Honea, chief executive officer at Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO), told the panel that CORHIO’s vendor partners have “come a long way in reducing the technology barriers to interoperability. The use of APIs … will help reduce the technological obstacles to interoperability.”

“As we think about the things we want to do with interoperability, whether it’s public health reporting, real-time alerting, or population health analytics, there are roles for query and response functionalities, but there are a lot of use cases out there that are going to require aggregated information and different types of data sets,” Honea said.

Jim Barnett, director of strategic intelligence analysis at AARP, stressed the need to help consumers with interoperability. “We see a lot of money being invested in infrastructure. That is great. We have systems talking to systems. That is where we have to begin,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the current state of interoperability is not great for consumers. The consumer is becoming the ultimate point of integration for all this data. If consumers are the last mile, they are not ready for it yet. A lot of responsibility is being put on them to figure things out, but they are not ready to do that yet. They need tools that are user friendly,” Barnett said.

Philip Parker, CEO of Coral Health, said that his company faces challenges is developing healthcare interoperability solutions.

“There is a lot of interaction with EHR vendors to get to their developer programs so that Coral Health is able to connect to the APIs they have available. It is also going out to the provider organizations and getting authorized to be able to access their endpoints,” Parker said.

“Some organizations like Epic make it easy to connect to their endpoints once you are approved. With others, like Cerner, you have to get individual authorizations from each provider organization before you are even allowed to help patients get their records through the FHIR [Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources] APIs that are available. There is a lot of dialogue with these health systems to go through those steps,” he concluded.