“Electronic health records have necessitated new opportunities for data exchange to provide clinicians with better information access and patients with more consistent medical care. EHR implementation is not a simple one-size-fits-all affair, and different agencies are exploring the technologies and strategies that best suit their needs on the road to achieving greater interoperability.”
“This is no different for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”
“We’re a group that’s really passionate about data exchange because we honestly believe that if you have the right data at the right time, you can improve or address a lot of the challenges that we have in health care today,’ CMS Deputy Chief Health Informatics Officer Alexandra Mugge said during GovernmentCIO Media & Research’s EHR Summit.”
“The Department of Veterans Affairs has been undergoing a large EHR effort to deploy its new common record for interoperability with the Defense Department. The single EHR instance for all veterans and service members has also introduced greater interoperability in its community care programs.”
“’The raison d’être is to enhance information sharing between the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs,’ Dr. Paul Tibbits, executive director of the VA’s Office of Technical Integration, said during the summit. ‘The second core aspect of it for us in the VA is the standardization of health care processes and practices throughout the Veteran’s Health Administration. So, to standardize the approaches to medical quality assurance, drug-drug interaction checking, and all those quality aspects of health care delivery for which there’s been a fair amount of latitude for local decision-making in the department up to now.'”
“Although each health care agency is working on health data interoperability in some way, they’re taking different approaches to it…” Read the full article here.
Source: CMS, VA Talk EHR Interoperability Initiatives – By Katherine MacPhail, November 23, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
