Perspective
The technical ecosystem of healthcare industry has changed. The financial crisis in 07-08 was a global economic downturn sometimes compared to the Great Depression. In the year that followed, the U.S. government passed a spending bill outlining the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) often referred to as the "stimulus package". ARRA was crafted to spur the economy, invest in infrastructure, enhance healthcare, and other fiscal needs.
At the time, implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) started accelerating. ARRA underscored the investments by hospitals and clinical practices with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. The total cost for ARRA is outside the scope of this statement, but the HITECH Act provided ~$35 billion to promote the adoption of health information technology, particularly EHRs.
Of this amount, approximately $26 billion was specifically designated for Medicare and Medicaid that aimed to incentivize healthcare providers to adopt and properly use EHR systems. Through the program called “Meaningful Use”, the government basically subsidized part of the cost of installing and using EHRs. The remaining funds were allocated to various other initiatives such as development of health information exchanges, workforce training, enhanced privacy, and compliance.
In the past 15+ years, EHRs have been universally adopted that represents a massive source of valuable data. When affectively collected and harvested, these data offer significant advantages by improving patient care, enhancing operational efficiency, supporting informed decision-making, monitoring public health, improving quality and safety, engaging patients, managing population health, facilitating interoperability, advancing research, and ensuring compliance.
Healthcare data, when appropriately integrated with non-clinical data such as geographic encoding, is driving newer concepts called social determinants of health that are focused on population health and welfare. Even unstructured data such as clinical notes are becoming minable to derive computable phenotypes.
Recent standards such as HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) facilitate universal data exchange between data silos using standardized clinical terminology and ubiquitous web technology, that is, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are redefining how we (hopefully) appropriately and best use these technologies for healthcare data to gain new insights. Furthermore, cloud-based storage and computing power have begun to leverage vast, centralized datastores which is of particular interest to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
EHRs and their rich data repositories are big business. Optimize clinical research and compliance with proven expert informatics engagement. My experience combines knowledge with technology to streamline clinical data liquidity, ensure compliance, and accelerate discovery. Singular but multidimensional, Harnett Online provides solutions and perspective that empower informed decisions supported by an experiential and academic framework.