With the ringing in of 2011, healthcare IT has a tall order to fill: Interoperability.
A host of federal programs this year, funded under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act, will launch an earnest quest for new payment models, including accountable care organizations, value-based purchasing and bundled payments. All of these will be dependent on electronic health data collection and, more importantly, interoperability.
2011 will kick off the Stage 1 collection of healthcare data to be “meaningfully used” for fairly substantial returns to providers for EHR adoption. But, as many federal officials have said, without interoperability of the data to improve public health, EHR adoption is pointless.
We can expect some guidance from front-runners in interoperability in 2011 with the Beacon Community Program. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology granted more than $250 million last year to 17 “beacon communities” nationwide that exemplify the positive impact of healthcare IT on population health.
Other activities will help lay the groundwork for interoperability, including live testing of the Nationwide Health Information Network, the creation of standards for health data exchange and the awarding of $16 million in grant funding for health information exchange breakthroughs at the state level.
The Health IT Policy Committee, a federal advisory group, will begin this year to nail down the details of meaningful use Stage 2, to be used in 2013. Paul Tang, chairman of the committee’s Meaningful Use Workgroup, said that by next April providers and vendors will have “some idea” of what will be expected for meaningful use Stage 2, even if the final policy has not been released. He said interoperability would be “a big focus” of the Stage 2 requirements.
At a recent press briefing, David Merritt, executive vice president and director of National Health Policy at the Center for Health Transformation, said payment models and incentive programs slated for 2014 and 2015 assume a level of interoperability that just isn't there.
“I think we can certainly get there, but it’s going to take a heck of a lot of work,” he said.