Micky Tripathi

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An interoperability update: Do we need more carrots and sticks?

Earlier this year, the ONC released the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), which responds to a mandate included in 2016’s 21st Century Cures Act and lays out principles, terms and conditions on which to base an interoperability framework that healthcare organizations can embrace. “This means patients who have received care from multiple doctors and hospitals should have their medical history electronically accessible on demand by any other treating provider in a network that signed the Common Agreement,” said National Coordinator for Health IT Donald Rucker in a recent blog post. To achieve that goal, TEFCA is divided into parts A, the principles, and B, the terms and conditions, which is also where the rubber meets the road for many who live in the healthcare IT world...

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Apple Is Quietly Working on Turning Your iPhone into the One-Stop Shop for All Your Medical Info

Christina Farr | CNBC | June 14, 2017

Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information — every doctor's visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command. No more logging into hospital websites or having to call your previous doctor to get them to forward all that information to your new one. Apple is working on making that scenario a reality...

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Congress is its own roadblock to interoperability

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | April 8, 2015

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has received a large number of comments on its draft interoperability road map. Some commenters have praised it; others have offered criticisms. Yet, we can't ignore that ONC is not alone at the interoperability drawing board. Both the CommonWell Health Alliance and Carequality, Healtheway's interoperability initiative, are forging ahead with their own initiatives. There also are the health information exchanges, with their different rules, operating models and governance structures.

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DeSalvo: America 'Waiting For Us To Get Interoperability Right'

Tom Sullivan, | Government Health IT | September 3, 2014

Calling it a “changing of the horizon,” national coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, said that her office is working to refresh the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.  “It’s an opportunity to look at HIT beyond the EHR and policy levers beyond meaningful use,” DeSalvo said of the forthcoming plan...

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Fed Advisors Say Data Blocking not Hindering Interoperability

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | August 26, 2015

the task force’s observation flies in the face of an April 2015 report to Congress from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT which highlighted the problem of electronic health information blocking, drawing attention to how both provider and vendor “bad actors” are interfering with data exchange. In its report, ONC argued that some EHR vendors are preventing the exchange of health information with competitors and how some providers engage in information blocking to control referrals and enhance their market dominance over competitors.

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Halamka on Enabling Nationwide Interoperability

...recently, the ONC Interoperability Roadmap, recognizing that the building blocks of universal interoperability could not be so neatly erected, leans on the idea of “coordinated governance” of networks. While these frameworks have paid homage to the concept of nationwide network as a “network of networks”, we have yet to crisply define the stitching needed to form this nationwide network quilt. This issue hasn’t been so pressing up until now because there were relatively few networks – the “last mile” problem was the bigger concern. Network formation is evolving rapidly, however, which has made more pressing the question of what it means to connect networks in a uniform way.

Halamka on MU3 Regs: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

On Friday March 20, CMS released the Electronic Health Record Incentive Program-Stage 3 and ONC released the 2015 Edition Health Information Technology (Health IT) Certification Criteria, 2015 Edition Base Electronic Health Record (EHR) Definition, and ONC Health IT Certification Program Modifications. Perhaps the most important statement in the entire 700+ pages is the following from the CMS rule:  "Stage 3 of meaningful use is expected to be the final stage and would incorporate portions of the prior stages into its requirements."

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Halamka on the Most Important Interoperability Story of 2016

You may have missed or not understood the implications of this press release.  Here's a guest post from Micky Tripathi, the CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative that explains everything you need to know: "This summary provides some additional information on the recently announced interoperability agreement between CommonWell and The Sequoia Project (Carequality).  For full disclosure, I am on the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project, a contractor to CommonWell, and participated in the discussions leading to the agreement.  The description below does not necessarily reflect the views of either of these organizations or any of the named vendors...

Has Meaningful Use Lost Its Utility For Physicians?

Marla Durben Hirsch | FierceEMR | March 20, 2014

Now seems to be the time for physicians to evaluate their participation in the Meaningful Use program. After all, we're on the brink of leaving the carrot-only incentive phase and entering the penalty phase for those providers who don't meet federal requirements.

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HIE 'Rules Of Road': What's Next?

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee | GovInfoSecurity.com | September 17, 2012

Supporters of a recent decision by federal regulators to back away from issuing voluntary "rules of the road" for secure health information exchange say the move makes sense [...]. But some others argue that establishing HIE benchmarks, especially for privacy and security, is advisable now to help build public trust. Read More »

HL7 Launches Joint Argonaut Project to Advance FHIR

Press Release | Health Level Seven International (HL7) | December 4, 2014

Leading Health IT industry vendors and providers collaborate with HL7 to accelerate development and adoption of FHIR Read More »

How Closed EHR Records Cause Paralysis

Take a step back from the challenges that surround health information technology (HIT) interoperability and you will recognize that market forces and a desperately fragmented health care system make hospitals and vendors act the way we do...The predominant proprietary HIT vendors know about the interoperability gap yet engage in prolonged foot-dragging on even basic data interfacing. Read More »

Interoperability: Can It Really Happen In 10 Years?

Mike Miliard | Government Health IT | December 16, 2014

With electronic health records now in place among hospitals and medical practices, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT embraced its new mandate in 2014: getting them to talk to each other...

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JASON Task Force Says Stage 3 Must Be Less Stringent

Mike Miliard | Government Health IT | October 6, 2014

Meaningful use stages 1 and 2 have failed to foster interoperability "in any practical sense."  That's the contention of Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, and David McCallie, senior vice president of medical informatics at Cerner, co-chairs of ONC's joint HIT Policy and Standards Committee JASON task force...

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JASON Task Force To ONC: Consider Delaying MU Stage 3 Incentives

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | October 14, 2014

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT should narrow Meaningful Use Stage 3 to focus on interoperability and "assertively monitor" the transition to public APIs but implement only "non-regulatory steps" to catalyze the transition, according to ONC's JASON task force...

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