Get Real Health’s Senior Healthcare Strategist, Christina Caraballo, had the opportunity to testify before Federal Advisory Committees’ Interoperability Experience Task Force on Friday, May 13th. The topic of her speech was the evolution of the patient engagement landscape and what the industry’s focus should be today and in the future.
Her testimony honed in on the path to not only providing patients with access to their health data, but presenting it to them in a manner that is useful and actionable. Stagnant data alone does not equal engagement. Engagement is optimized when information is gathered from a myriad of sources and comes alive for the individual and their providers.
Caraballo demonstrated how Meaningful Use (MU) has been a best of times and worst of times scenario for health IT. While many organizations have adopted necessary technology and practices and given patients data access along the way, the majority have not. And a large percentage of those that have, are just checking federally mandated boxes and not targeting patient engagement per se.
The industry needs to look beyond MU and visualize a world where data is presented in real time to patients, caregivers and affiliated third party organizations such as research facilities in one seamless solution. Our job in the future is to open the gateways to let patient data flow securely from one ecosystem to another.
Once Caraballo outlined the goals, she spoke directly about the path to achieving them. Utilizing both provider trust bundles like DirectTrust, and patient trust bundles such as NATE’s BB4C is vital as a first step as we build a framework for emerging standards such as HL7’s FHIR. Further, systems should allow for automatic authentication as opposed to cumbersome in-person identity validation.
Additionally, Caraballo suggested that the VDT in MU requirements actually be VDTR to include View, Transmit, Download and Receive to enhance communication among parties.
Caraballo sums up the experience by saying, “It is refreshing and encouraging that the Interoperability Experience Task Force is working to garner a better understanding of the patient experience and how interoperability impacts innovative, best-of-breed, and emerging technology.”