When it comes to evaluating interoperability, a group of healthcare associations say ONC is too focused on how much information is moved around instead of the quality of the information being moved around.
A group of 37 medical associations, including the American Medical Association, American college of Surgeons and American College of Physicians, sent a letter to Karen DeSalvo, MD, national coordinator for health IT, and Andy Slavitt, acting administrator for CMS, in response to a request for information assessing interoperability in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act.
The medical associations are concerned with how the ONC is measuring benchmarks for interoperability, saying the agency is too focused on the quantity of data being moved around instead of how useful and relevant that information is.
"Greater exchange of patient data does not mean that we are achieving interoperability and better coordinated care," according to the letter. "For medical professionals and patients alike, interoperability means the usefulness, timeliness, correctness and completeness of data, as well as the ease and cost of information access."
The associations suggest measures that assess more than how many times documents are exchanged may help promote competition in the health IT market. Currently, measures are too broad to effectively achieve and measure interoperability, according to the letter.
"Continuing a policy of 'counting physician clicks' will not adequately measure interoperability or incentivize health IT developers to make significant changes. Rather, it will further propel developers to build EHRs that simply meet federal reporting requirements that focus solely on data exchange," according to the letter.
The associations urge ONC to identify objectives in which interoperability is inherent, such as specialty-specific use cases, instead of focusing on the quantity of data exchanged.
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