According to Bill Tinston, Director of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization Effort (FEHRM), the implementation of joint HIE and FHIR adoption have helped support better data sharing for overall Veteran care.

As highlighted by EHR Intelligence, Tinston made note of this at a recent Cerner Health Conference session, and discussed how federal officials created a joint health information exchange (HIE) to support interoperability with community health providers.

This is an extension of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) interoperability strategy, which was issued to Congress as part of the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“At this point, we're at about 65 percent interoperability from a data perspective and it appears to us that we're going to get well over 95 percent by the end of this calendar year,” Tinston said in the session.

He also explained that in addition to improving clinician access to Veteran health information, the joint HIE has helped improve how clinicians view and interact with that data. The DoD and VA also have adopted FHIR standards to streamline data sharing in the legacy environment between the two departments.

Overall, one of the core takeaways from this session was that we need to collectively build an ecosystem of health IT that providers don’t have to think about. In other words, the technology should completely enable all provider workflows without any friction for the providers and patients.

“I don't want clinicians or hospital administrators thinking about the IT,” Tate noted. “I want them to be able to make the best decisions they can about how health systems interact with one another and support one another.”

RosettaHealth can assist with any health information challenges you might have, book a free consultation with one of our interoperability experts.