Moving Healthcare Forward: Can Accessible Health Data Become a Reality?

By Hugh Gordon & Kaeli Yuen

In today’s world of increasing connectedness, patients and physicians alike are vexed by the difficulty of accessing electronic health data. In this post, we will discuss some thoughts on why healthcare has been slow to adopt technologies that can provide a solution.

In our previous post, we discussed APIs and how they can be leveraged to improve access to health data. Opening APIs to external developers is not novel. In fact, there are many successful companies built specifically around this concept — e.g. Stripe for financial transactions and Twilio for communications. Public APIs have gained traction as a viable means for spurring innovation in many industries.

Healthcare is just now joining that group. What has prevented healthcare from developing public API’s until now? It seems like a slam dunk – there exist piles and piles of health data, and there are lots of cool, productive things one could do with it.  It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to picture doctors everywhere utilizing mobile technology in hospitals, and patients getting up-to-the-second updates on their latest diagnoses. Letting your imagination wander only slightly, you could imagine the nearest hospital receiving an incoming patient’s entire medical history the instant he gets into a car accident.

Public health implications of standardized data access are also tremendous. Analyzing health data nationwide would provide fresh insights into the biggest health problems of our era, including diabetes and cardiac disease. Instead, there is growing frustration among doctors by what little payoff they see from the large amount of EHR documentation required of them.

The reasons for healthcare’s delay are multifactorial. Until recently, the data hadn’t yet been digitized. That barrier has mostly been overcome, but others remain. Economic incentives are such that free and easy exchange of health data could be detrimental to hospitals and EMR vendors. And, of course, there are valid concerns about privacy and data integrity.

Now, the tide is beginning to turn in favor of digital advances in healthcare. Recent years have seen a significant increase in adoption of EHR systems, owing to the Medicare and Medicaid incentives introduced by the Meaningful Use (MU) program (see earlier post).

For widely accessible health data to become a reality, healthcare providers need to be convinced that the technology is safe, is secure, makes financial sense, and improves outcomes. Increasing momentum of consumer efforts to increase access to digital health information (for example, GetMyHealthData) indicate that patients are convinced of these benefits, and that there is demand for this technology.

A large portion of MU Stage 3 is dedicated to improving access to health data. Once the rule takes effect, patients may gravitate toward providers who offer the digital connectivity they desire. As digital health tools gain credibility and begin to yield positive outcomes, healthcare systems that do not support these tools will be left behind. With the combination of government prodding, consumer demand, and new developments such as FHIR (see previous post), we think that that tipping point is coming sooner rather than later.

Hugh Gordon and Kaeli Yuen work for Akido Labs, a company that brings modern data management technology to hospitals. Learn more at www.akidolabs.com.