Infographic from Adventist University of Health Sciences. Facts, statistics, and examples related to hospital efforts to improve the health of the communities in which they operate.

Reference: https://www.ehidc.org/resources/how-hospitals-can-improve-health-whole-communities-infographic

The future of U.S. healthcare demands extensive coordination across the full continuum of care. But accurate patient identification and patient matching are essential for this coordination: - The ability to access patient information is integral to care coordination across the full continuum of care; - Resolving patient identities across disparate systems is critical to accessing information; - Existing Master Patient Indexes (MPIs) cannot resolve identities consistently or well enough to support healthcare's emerging needs. Learn why a new type of MPI technology will pave the way for "identity interoperability" across the entire continuum of care.

Immunization Information Systems (IIS) have been under development for over twenty years in the US with systems deployed in nearly every state and territory. Yet no national IIS exists, and no serious discussion is underway for a national strategy for IIS data access. This white paper describes the enablers and barriers for creating a national IIS strategy, as well as various potential models for its development, including the attributes, strengths, and challenges for each proposed option. Finally, suggestions are made for informing US policy in this area moving forward.

In January 2015, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the first draft of their Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap. The roadmap lays out the principles, requirements and strategies for enabling and managing interoperability within what it calls the “Learning Health System” (LHS), which represents a paradigm shift in the healthcare ecosystem within which organizations operate. Within this vision, the LHS will feel less like a collection of interoperable systems and more like one large virtual system, providing appropriate access to data where and when it is needed–both for clinical as well as analytic purposes. Many EHR vendors are putting up barriers to access data that comes into the EHR even if the data originates within an organization – often referred to as “information blocking,” which may lead to increased monetization of healthcare data. While the use by vendors of standards-based versus proprietary approaches to data access helps reduce some of these barriers, the strict use of standards by vendors does not guarantee that data will be accessible and available to the organizations that have already paid to capture and store it. This article will discuss the potential impact that the LHS will have on the development of interoperability standards within healthcare and the continuing evolution of electronic health records (EHRs) to meet this vision. This article will offer perspectives on how healthcare organizations can work to educate themselves and advocate for systems more supportive of the LHS’s emerging needs.

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.

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.