Jordan Everson | June 17, 2024
A decade ago, as EHRs were rapidly implemented across the country, ONC sought to make sure these newly implemented technologies were interoperable. Since 2014, ONC has tracked progress toward widespread interoperability among hospitals and physicians by measuring their engagement in four domains of health information exchange: electronically finding, sending, receiving, and integrating patient health information. As shown in the figure below, US hospitals experienced widespread progress toward interoperability with 70% of hospitals reporting that they ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ engaged in all four domains in 2023,
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Jordan Everson | November 13, 2023
Many hospitals have adopted systems for interoperable patient data exchange and are connected to national networks. However, ONC has consistently found that rates of interoperable exchange for smaller, rural, and independent hospitals have notably lagged behind other hospitals. For example, in both 2017 and 2021, rural hospitals were 23 percentage points less likely to engage in interoperable exchange compared to urban hospitals. In a recent study, ONC explored this digital divide to better understand the relationship between interoperable exchange and measures of hospitals that served populations that have been marginalized.
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Catherine Strawley | October 26, 2023
Screening for patients’ health-related social needs can help providers more effectively coordinate patient care and connect patients to the resources they need. Social needs are social conditions—such as food insecurity, housing instability, and lack of reliable transportation—which often result from underlying social determinants of health and can adversely affect health outcomes if left unaddressed. While studies show that patients are generally comfortable with social needs screening, little is known about patients’ comfort or preferences around how social needs data are captured and shared with other providers and service organizations to inform treatment and care coordination.
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Wei Chang | July 31, 2023
Jordan Everson | May 31, 2023
According to a recent American Hospital Association (AHA) survey, most hospitals know about the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common AgreementSM (TEFCASM) and, among those, very few plan on sitting out.
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