Many Hospitals Still Holding Out On Direct Health Information Sharing

So, after investing what feels like infinite levels of effort, patient medical records are digitized across nearly all hospitals in the US, according to a new ONC Data Brief. Great.

However, at least when this data was collected in 2019, hospitals were still playing their little passive-aggressive game where they make the data available to patients but hard to get to colleagues and competitors.

To me, this suggests that even with Information Blocking rules firmly in place now, hospitals are likely to find ways to impede the provider-to-provider data sharing process. We are talking about a 10-year tantrum even ONC won’t be able to calm down completely.

It’s not that the health information sharing process isn’t maturing. Things are indeed changing for the better. For example, the data gathered by ONC shows that in 2019, 70% of hospitals let inpatients access their health information using a mobile software application, up almost 50% from 2018. This is nothing to be sneezed at.

However, when it comes to allowing patients to transmit or send the health information electronically to third parties, things look much different. In fact, according to the ONC, the proportion of hospitals that enabled patients to view, download and transmit their health information electronically has barely changed since 2016.

What’s even more striking is that while nine out of 10 hospitals have EHRs in place giving them the ability to transmit the health data electronically, just three-quarters of the hospitals said they had enabled this functionality in 2019.

One interesting sidelight is that hospitals offered patients electronic access to health information in outpatient settings at different rates depending on whether the hospital used the same EHR across all their outpatient sites. The report speculates that the reasons could include lack of conductivity or technical capabilities needed to share data between different EHRs. It contended that implementing standards-based APIs could address this problem.

Anyway, back to the main event. And pardon me if I get all skeptical, what I see here is thousands of cats (hospitals) screeching and digging their claws in as they get dragged toward the bath.

After all the years of trying, we still don’t seem to have convinced a substantial number of hospitals that the era of health data silos is ending. Clearly, a fair number seem to believe that it’s in their interests to fight to the bitter end.

Unfortunately, the longer they manage to keep the information silos alive, the longer it will take for a comprehensive digital health ecosystem to emerge. Let’s hope to see a shift in this attitude real soon.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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