Description

Interoperability has become a critical consideration for all health IT (HIT) applications. All the major healthcare stakeholders across the world acknowledge the need to invest in digital infrastructure capabilities to facilitate cross-continuum patient information exchanges and support evidence-based care, at scale. Regulatory agencies are embracing forward-thinking policies that advocate the need for all the leading vendors to become fully interoperable with each other. The objective is to drive a progressive digital healthcare model, that is, a standardized, collaborative, and multidisciplinary yet modular approach that is based on an application programming interface (API). Many leading HIT vendors and hospitals in the United States are not likely to comply with CMS’ 21st Century Cures Act, although it makes provisions for the secure transfer of patient data across the care continuum (due to threats such as breach of patient privacy) and the overwhelming cost of commitment; provisions also exist to cover any significant penalties involved. Owing to COVID-19, most health systems’ essential services (both, manually driven and digitally enabled) are focused on tackling the unprecedented surge in patient footprint across primary, in-patient, and long-term care systems. Therefore, ONC in collaboration with CMS and HHS OIG has extended the timeline for the implementation of Interoperability Final Rules to 3 months post completion of the ONC Health IT Certification Program for specific value-based care tracks. Allscripts, IBM, Change Healthcare, and InterSystems are the leading US healthcare data interoperability market participants marked on the Frost Radar™. Optum is the fastest-growing company, and IBM is the most innovative.

Author: Koustav Chatterjee