CMS/ONC Data Announcement & Damo Consulting Executive Survey Show the Opportunity & Risk Ahead

The healthcare industry is still buzzing from the recent CMS and ONC announcements on data sharing, data blocking, and APIs from HIMSS. With the proposed rules of —724 pages from ONC and 250 from the CMS—regulators intend to push the industry to make use of application programming interfaces via FHIR to speed up how patients can access information on their mobile devices. The goal is to unleash a wave of patient oriented apps that empower patients to use and control their healthcare data making their choice of providers more portable.

Interestingly CMS pointed to several other data challenges healthcare organizations face that their rules won't impact for now:

• The ability to better master patient records to create a golden patient record.
• The ability to push cleansed, accurate information back to source systems

Both of these challenges are really Master Data Management (MDM) challenges. With this acknowledgement CMS is confirming an open secret, that the ability to create a mastered patient record in the leading EHR systems is really not sufficient for the enterprise. There are other data challenges that CMS didn't mention including mastering physician data and harmonizing data with the millions of codes and value sets healthcare uses. All this points to the need for healthcare organizations to invest in an enterprise data strategy and platform.

A recent survey by Domo Consulting really pointed out the continued disconnect between the need for an enterprise data strategy and platform and healthcare’s penchant for chasing silo solutions for the challenge du jour.  The survey released on January 10th revealed some interesting finding from its review with healthcare executives:

·      At 79% accelerating digital health initiatives was the number one priority

·      At 58% investing in advanced analytics and AI was the only other clear majority priority

·      At 79% the big finding was that healthcare executives see data silos and lack of interoperability are the biggest challenges to digital transformation

So now we come to the rub. The proposed rules from CMS and the ONC will hopefully encourage players at the table including EHR vendors and payers to make more data available through more robust FHIR APIs, however, there is always a however, data sharing via APIs is not sufficient for healthcare organizations to leverage that data. The danger is healthcare executives will see the headlines that data sharing will be more open therefor their data problems are solved. Healthcare executives most be educated on the need for a commitment to an enterprise data strategy and platform that can take on the MDM challenges laid out by CMS as well as many others they didn't mention.

Join us for a webinar as we discuss the announcements from HIMSS and how Omni-HealthData is uniquely qualified to provide the enterprise data management platform healthcare organizations will need as they transform care delivery around a digital experience.