Health system interoperability is seeing improvement, as 88 percent of organizations report that they are involved in an EHR data exchange, according to a January report from ONC.
The report analyzed the state of interoperability among hospitals, as of 2021, and identified six key trends of interoperability:
- Since 2017, the number of hospitals engaged in integrating patient health data into EHRs has grown 40 percent.
- Thirty-nine percent of hospitals in 2021 reported that they are participating in at least one of four national measured networks.
- The use of information received electronically from outside sources increased at twice the rate for rural and small hospitals from 20 percent to 40 percent between 2017 and 2021.
- Rural and small hospitals are lagging behind their larger counterparts in engagement in four domains of interoperability in 2017 and 2021.
- In 2021, three-quarters of hospitals reported that they had incorporated bulk data export technology into their EHRs.
- Analytics and reporting was the most common use of bulk data export technology among hospitals and health systems.
Read more of the findings here.