ONC: Hospitals Exchanging More Data, Increasing Use of Certified EHRs

ONC chief Donald Rucker, MD, and Talisha Searcy wrote in a blog post that 93 percent of non-federal acute care hospitals have already upgraded to the 2015 Edition or plan to upgrade, according to an analysis of the AHA’s Information Technology Supplement Survey. This helps advance interoperability since the 2015 certification criteria includes new technical capabilities (such as application programming interfaces) that were not required as part of the prior 2014 Edition.

“Our analysis also shows that hospitals are electronically sharing more patient data than ever before. Most hospitals can electronically send patient summary of care records (88 percent) and receive such records from outside sources (74 percent),” they write. In addition, hospitals that reported they can query or integrate this data significantly increased in the past year. Hospitals engaged in all four interoperability domains—electronically sending, receiving, finding, and integrating—increased 41 percent since 2016. While this growth is impressive, important work remains, as only four-in-ten hospitals reported they can find patient health information as well as send, receive, and integrate patient summary of care records from sources outside their health system.”

Click here to read the full blog post.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']/Portals/0/uploads/content_hub/Mary-Butler-Portrait.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Mary Butler is the associate editor at Journal of AHIMA.[/author_info] [/author]