What seems common in effective delivery, cost management, and healthcare quality? Almost there, it is “System Interoperability”. I am usually not the one opening my blog from a question but according to ONC (Office of the National Coordinator) for Healthcare Information Technology this is the hot topic getting frowned upon by maximum faces. The key here is that it enables the healthcare provider to interchange the patient health information with another entity in order to provide data for researching, for contributing the clinical information for predictive healthcare research and importantly to reduce the duplicity.

Healthcare any way is facing countless challenges like capital funding needs, accountable care, merger and acquisitions and an increasing number of aging patients for caring with extremely limited resources. Along with that another set of latest challenges have come up like secure sharing the patient information with all healthcare delivery system.

ONC has identified three specific factors to achieving their objectives:-

1. Cultivating the cultural change around information access: – In order to enhance the patient care and increase the results, patients and healthcare provider both should adapt to this new way of sharing information.

2. Improve common technical standards: – All Healthcare IT software company must follow the technical standards while developing and delivering the software solution for the healthcare industry. The development of this common technical standard is actively perused for more than 15 years.

3. Improving a true business care for interoperability: – The interoperable data exchange should support the development of business care that assures the value for all stakeholders. To support the data exchange methods and cultures, ONC’s provides methods to tie healthcare reimbursement for Medicaid and Medicare to meaningful health IT standards, essentially creating incentives for physicians and healthcare providers

This attempt is developed by supporting meaningful use stage 3 standards with MACRA 2015. MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act) includes a set of significant payment provisions, which contains MIPS (Merit-Based Incentive Payment System) that basically helps to compensate the healthcare providers which is based on formula that supports the payment based on four Circumstances:- resource use, clinical use, clinical practice improvement activities and Health IT meaningful use.

As a consequence to it, healthcare providers will require to adapt the new IT elements that deal with these circumstances. In order to support the enhancement in resource use and clinical quality, it enables to exchange the clinical records with other healthcare providers and patients. However, all these transformations require the Healthcare IT system that helps to support the improvement and measurement made inside the practices. This thing basically helps to focus on exchange and interoperability will only develop stronger as the industry grows towards a value-based approach to patient care.