Why 2022 will be A Pivotal Year for Interoperability and the Patient Experience?

We have overcome our early interoperability difficulties and are now moving forward. In 2022, we will finally be able to go on.

We can all agree that healthcare has come a long way in terms of interoperability in the previous five years. As a consequence of the 21st Century Cures Act and the FHIR standard, we have achieved progress. As early as 2022, we'll get started.

Despite the fact that national legislation continues to drive the industry toward interoperability, progressive local and regional organizations have achieved significant progress in this area. Electronic health records (EHRs) are being linked to doctors and nurses in local networks by health insurers. Health Current collaborated with CORHIO to build Contexture. Is essential for the exchange of health data between governments and regions. In Colorado and Arizona, Contexture has a total of 1800 hospitals. As a consequence of modern technology, it will be simpler to link regional and local communities. Businesses will eventually see the advantages of partnering on a more frequent basis (clinically and operationally).

In the coming year, we expect programs supporting interoperability in healthcare beyond clinical data to grow. For administrative duties like as claiming, revenue cycle management, eligibility, prior authorization, and coverage, inefficient and costly data transfer is now required, but this may change in the future. Medical delays, incorrect billing, and wasting member and patient time are all caused by a lack of administrative data interoperability. Data-sharing gadgets that can communicate with one another will become more common in 2022.

Blockchain in the healthcare

Ethereum, NFTs, and smart contracts are all built on top of blockchain technology. Several industries, including healthcare, will benefit from the adoption of blockchain technology in the years leading up to 2022.

Next year, there will be a short-term use case for blockchain, but this will have minimal influence on its long-term disruptive potential. This may be used by health care providers to determine a patient's eligibility, obtain authorization, and see all of their medical information at any time. Inefficiencies in heath care data flow, according to the CAQH 2020 Index Report, may save tens of billions of dollars each year. This might be a realistic use case for blockchain in the near future.

Patients, physicians, insurance companies, and suppliers should be able to communicate more simply thanks to blockchain technology. Only those with the right permissions have access to a decentralized ledger's accurate and unchangeable data. Network certification, security, and compliance will be handled by an unbiased network intermediate.

There is no need for point-to-point communication when using a blockchain-based network. The use of a blockchain in a network may be shown to add another layer of trust. The danger of data exchange is reduced when two individuals agree that they can trust one other. Everyone agrees to follow the system's rules because there are no "bad actors" in this system. Additional data processing companies are not required to ensure data or transactions' security. Continuous dynamic data updates and sharing are only feasible if all parties have complete faith in each other's motivations, approaches, and collaboration timescales. This is the health-care industry's vision for the future.

Businesses will no longer be needed to maintain separate gateways for distinct data kinds for the first time. IT expenditures may be reduced while productivity rises when the focus shifts from data interchange to data access.

What to expect in 2022 Healthcare interoperability

This year, we asked Healthcare IT Today readers to forecast the next two years or so. It's always interesting to hear what others have to say.

We haven't talked about interoperability in a long time. It takes a decade for interoperability standards to evolve into something that can be utilized with other goods. That should have been dealt with by now, but it hasn't. Aside from the fact that they did not want to provide the information, there was another factor that made it tough. The interoperability forecasts offered here illustrate this.

We feel that this is a regular part of conducting business in a world where enterprises are required to meet an expanding number of regulatory standards. There is a lot of work to be done this year to meet the ONC and CMS criteria from three years ago. Certified EHRs have a long way to go in terms of security and identity assurance.

The remaining work will be mostly focused on improving security and usability. It's possible that a single ID will be used to access data from many sources. Individuals who get event notifications will need to employ new standards, such as the Direct Standard, to make them more helpful, such as Event Notifications. We anticipate that more organizations will use closed-loop referrals that use 360x via the Direct Standard.

Interoperability will be doomed unless the data being shared and handled is both safe and fast. Better data quality evaluation and monitoring methodologies will be necessary in the future as the usage of Health information exchange (HIE) systems and electronic health record (EHR) migrations grows.

Clinical decision support and semantic loss are both reduced, as is the burden on frontline physicians, when data errors and overly complicated systems are avoided by a high level of data dependability.

Fee-for-service health care was shown to be ineffective during the epidemic, underlining the importance of value-based therapy in the years ahead. Doctors have less time to focus on value-based reimbursement as the number of COVID-19 patients grows. Policymakers, on the other hand, must continue despite the challenges on the road to value-based care.

It's possible that 2022 may be the ideal year for enhancing transparency, matching payer and provider goals, and obtaining actionable data. For example, new technologies make it easier to construct and run high-performance networks, route patients to high-value providers, expand the scope of existing programs, assess and improve performance, and monitor, analyze, and improve. An interoperable dataset architecture may be used to create a single patient ID.

We’ll see leveling up in 2022

More patient data is being collected than ever before. There is a possible problem of lack of understanding when it comes to health care. Healthcare practitioners will require access to and use of clinical data in 2022 in order to improve patient care and experience.

Treatment delays persist even after 20 months, leading to a rise in the number of chronic illness diagnoses and an increase in health-care spending. Manually resolving this long-term issue is impossible. In 2022, increased patient knowledge and information sharing will make it simpler to deal with high-risk patient populations.

In 2022, things will begin to improve.

As a result, risk-bearing arrangements such as health plans, accountable care organizations (ACOs), provider networks, and others will exert tremendous pressure on the healthcare industry. They expect to have quick access to clinical data.

Existing standards and national networks will evolve over time as new businesses emerge, such as post-acute, behavioral, and social health care. As a result, people will be able to think outside the box when it comes to communicating health information.

We've narrowed our focus to the tasks listed above because of the way regulations influence healthcare IT. In addition to hospital treatment at home and telemedicine, we're focusing on these initiatives since we know how laws influence IT.