A recent healthcare IT article discussed the issue of medical record interoperability. More than two dozen healthcare organizations and technology companies sent an open letter this past week to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget, urging them to quickly finalize rules allowing application programming interface (API) access to patient records.

The letter was signed by major organizations like Apple, IBM and Microsoft, but not any major Electronic Health Records (EHR) vendors. While EHR vendors have shown support for the patient access goals of the soon-to-come ONC rules, it has aired concerns about are the patient privacy implications of enabling more open data sharing with third-party apps.

The Health Information Technology and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as part of the 21st Century Cures Act, recommended modern tools like (APIs) to help facilitate the exchange of health data and electronic health records. By finalizing the rules, the administration can provide patients, technology developers, and health care providers with clarity on API requirements.

The document comes less than a month the HHS published the draft 2020-2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, developed for the body by the ONC. The Strategic Plan lays out goals and objectives for federal health IT efforts to ensure patients have access to their electronic health information.

While major strides are being taken to improve the way medical data and EHRs can be transferred, analyzed and shared, major hurdles to full interoperability remain, and will be a key development point in healthcare IT this year.

We have received feedback from our clients that full interoperability of patient medical records does not exist today. There is also agreement that with medical record interoperability patient care will be improved.