This article is is an essay about the state of health data interoperability in the US and it grew largely out of the author's experience working on the ONC 2016 Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap.

Jason Goldwater explains how blockchain technology is used to foster the development of patient-reported outcome measures in a detailed white paper from the National Quality Forum.

Patient record matching has been a key area of emphasis for healthcare in the US, with several major efforts to identify best practices in the past decade. Because of a lack of a national patient identifier, several distinct approaches to patient matching in both the public and private sectors have emerged, which do not appear to be converging. One major focus of a number of patient matching initiatives is the identification of a core set of data elements found in most patient records, regardless of setting, to facilitate matching. These initiatives have also not yet converged. Some organizations participate in master patient index (MPI) deployments within their agency or jurisdiction. But participation in a shared MPI can also be challenging, and policies and processes for synchronizing record changes, among other issues, must be carefully considered. “Promising practices” should be identified from those jurisdictions that have lived through a migration to an enterprise MPI. While the healthcare ecosystem has learned a great deal, this is an area where constant quality improvement must be applied. The healthcare community must monitor the disparate public and private initiatives to solve the patient matching challenge, and adjust as needed to accommodate approaches intended to be universally implemented.

On 8/24/17, eHI responded to a request for public comment on ONC's implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act trusted exchange framework and common agreement provisions.

Verato covers trending topics about data analytics and interoperablity.

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act.

Strategic Interests disscusses improving transitions of care, practice transformation efforts, analytics and much more.

FHIR is a new standard that defines a web API and related specifications for health data exchange.

Most agree that HIE’s have the potential to eliminate redundant and often harmful medical procedures. Some suggest that HIE’s are a critical component for any organization offering valued-based care and pop health services.

Many organizations are attempting to show value by measuring the volume of transactions and some are trying to showing how HIE's can create greater efficiencies from a cost savings perspective. These efforts are likely to fall short of what’s truly needed.

Adopting the rigor of a continuous process improvement approach to measure the value of investments is necessary to ensure continued sustainability of HIE's - at the state and community level. This resource can help provide with the basic building blocks to get started and a roadmap to ensure future success