“Smaller health care providers aren’t adopting federal data standards as fast as the government would like due to an understandable technical skills gap, according to the chief of the IT Resource Branch of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.”
“Speaking at AFCEA Bethesda‘s Health IT Event on Tuesday, Sam Michael said the transition to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) Release 4 (R4) is ‘going well’ but is essentially an ‘unfunded mandate.'”
“To allow for easy sharing of standardized medical data for reporting and research purposes, the 21st Century Cures Act gives health-care providers, information exchanges and IT developers until December 31, 2022, to ensure their applications comply with FHIR R4. That’s easier for large, technically advanced hospital systems than small, non-technical health-care providers.”
“’This is no judgment at all,’ Michael said. ‘I think everyone realizes there are different degrees of technical skill at different sites that are even submitting the data…'”
“The agency continues to tout the benefits of FHIR R4 as a research tool, because it holds more data, with the hope of convincing more partners submitting data to quickly adopt the standard.”
“Other Department of Health and Human Services agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs, are all-in on FHIR standards and have teams working toward implementation. But in the case of the VA, the department is currently more focused on improving data quality between its two electronic health records: VistA and Cerner Millennium, said Chief Data Officer Kshemendra Paul…” Read the full article here.
Source: Transition to federal health data standards an ‘unfunded mandate’ for smaller providers – By Dave Nyczepir, February 1, 2022. FedScoop.
