5 Steps for Interoperability Excellence for Healthcare Providers

As if 2020 couldn’t be any more challenging for healthcare providers, new federal rules on interoperability and patient access, granting patients direct access to their healthcare data, begin taking effect in 2021 and will continue into 2022. These rules, while ultimately beneficial to patients, bring an additional level of operational complexity to many revenue-stressed healthcare organizations.

If anything, the 2020 pandemic has illustrated the vast potential of interoperability. For example, consider the huge increase in 2020 in virtual care visits, projected to be more than 1 billion by year’s end, and with an estimated 90% related to Covid-19. Many of these new virtual health patients will move through different care networks, using different health plans, and seeking remote access to their health records. These are precisely the type of patients interoperability is meant to help.

What should healthcare providers be doing now to ensure they’re not only compliant with new interoperability rules, but also applying them as optimally as possible to benefit their patients and organizations? In this article, we review the upcoming rules and suggest five key steps providers can take to ensure their interoperability implementations proceed as smoothly as possible.