So TEFCA is live. Now what?

Don Rucker, MD, 1upHealth’s Chief of Strategy Officer and former ONC chief, recently sat down with Healthcare IT News to chat about what’s next for interoperability in the US, the advantages of FHIR-enabled tools and the importance of being able to analyze population-wide health data. 

When asked what interoperability challenges he sees TEFCA addressing Don responded, “It’s a hard space. And it’s worth understanding why it’s hard. You can look at connectivity: Are we getting information on one patient? Or on a population? And then the other dimension is: Is this connectivity the patient controls, or that gets data into patients’ hands, or is this connectivity between providers? So those are probably three somewhat separate buckets.”

He continued, “I see TEFCA, as it is, as sort of a placeholder for some of the richer computing that needs to follow if we’re going to have a rational healthcare system. If we’re going to do the things that are measures of value, measures of public health support for social determinants of health, we need sort of a different system than the connectivity pathways that we have today.”

To read the Don’s commentary in full, click here: Read Article

This article was originally published by Healthcare IT News on January 24th, 2022. 

About Healthcare IT New: 

Healthcare IT News is owned by HIMSS Media and provides comprehensive industry coverage on emerging trends, business applications, technical standards, and new products. It reaches a monthly audience of 292K decision-makers, execs, and technologists from across healthcare.

About 1upHealth: 

1upHealth is the leading FHIR® platform that connects an ecosystem of payers, providers, patients, life sciences, and app developers within a trusted interoperability network. Unlike legacy enterprise companies, 1upHealth was created and built with the modern healthcare infrastructure in mind. The 1up FHIR® platform is serverless with cloud-native applications that transform data at enterprise scale with greater ease and simplicity to improve patient outcomes, drive population-level analytics and enable medical innovation. Founded in 2017, the company is connected to more than 10,000 clinical endpoints with best-in-class FHIR® APIs. Gartner designated 1upHealth a “Cool Vendor in Healthcare Interoperability” for its FHIR® platform.