This project is focused on measuring and describing patient medication adherence patterns and ultimately applying the data to inform clinical decisions, design intervention strategies, and improve patient outcomes. From Advocate Cerner Collaboration, Advocate Health Care.

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.

The Roadmap for Pharmacy Health Information Technology Integration in U.S. Health Care
2011–2015 (Roadmap) was the first pharmacy health information technology (HIT) strategic
plan. The purpose of this document is to align the first Roadmap to the vision, mission, goals and
objectives of the Collaborative’s 2014–2017 Strategic Plan. The document also identifies the
goals in the first Roadmap related to the status, importance, and relevance to the industry
of the objectives and strategies. The Roadmap will be updated to reflect the areas the
pharmacy industry needs to focus on and the areas mapped to the Collaborative’s 2014–2017
Strategic Plan.

The Roadmap for Pharmacy Health Information Technology Integration in U.S. Health Care (Roadmap) is the first pharmacy health information technology (HIT) strategic plan. This plan was developed by national pharmacy associations and other key stakeholders that comprise the Pharmacy e-Health Information Technology Collaborative (Collaborative).

An interactive PDF of Merck's survey tool which allows health care professionals to estimate the likelihood of non-adherence to prescription medications.

Executive summary of a 2013 analysis from Cerner in Corportate Wellness Magazine. Abstract: Due to barriers such as cost, regimen complexity and perceived inefficacy, a substantial percentage of patients do not conform to medical instructions. On-site health centers with on-site pharmacies may improve medication adherence through convenient, holistic and relatively inexpensive care. Accordingly, this study sought to evaluate the influence of these on-site pharmacies on medication adherence. Using a retrospective analysis of electronic prescribing and claims data, medication adherence was assessed among employees and their dependents that received medications from an on-site health center’s pharmacy compared with those that used an alternative site.

Authors emphasize the importance of diagnosing medication nonadherence and determining how to minimize it for a given patient. They suggest approaches to the patient designed to uncover nonadherence, to avoid inadvertently encouraging it, and to encourage adherence. From a 2013 issue of Family Practice Management.

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.