Last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report, “Nonfederal Efforts to Help Achieve Health Information Interoperability,” in which representatives from 18 health information exchange (HIE) initiatives described a variety of efforts they are undertaking to achieve or facilitate electronic health record (EHR) interoperability. The stakeholders involved concluded that to date, interoperability has remained limited.
The stakeholder and initiative representatives GAO interviewed described five key challenges to achieving EHR interoperability, which are consistent with challenges described in past GAO work. Specifically, the challenges they described are (1) insufficiencies in health data standards, (2) variation in state privacy rules, (3) accurately matching patients’ health records, (4) costs associated with interoperability, and (5) the need for governance and trust among entities, such as agreements to facilitate the sharing of information among all participants in an initiative.
The report also found that changes to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS’s) Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs would also help move nationwide interoperability forward. Specifically, representatives from 10 of the initiatives noted that efforts to meet the programs’ requirements divert resources and attention from other efforts to enable interoperability. For the full article click here
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