‘We live in an app economy’
DR. DONALD RUCKER, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Trump administration’s top health IT official, walked through some of the ways he believes proposed regulations on interoperability will spur innovation during remarks at the Transformation Summit, particularly the heavy emphasis on using application programming interfaces, better known as APIs, to link EHRs with third-party apps.
ON THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF APPS
Look around—we live in an app economy. We look at the retail finance industry, the retail transportation industry, the entertainment industry, certainly shopping. You can look at America’s shopping malls if you have any doubt about the power of the app economy.
ON HIPAA REGULATIONS IN AN APP ENVIRONMENT
The goal of the (21st Century Cures Act’s) IT section is to give patients control of their data on their smartphone at their convenience. When you control something, you probably are also likely responsible for it. It’s the same thing here. Once you, as a patient … download your data, at that point, the data is yours and your responsibility. … Providers are not liable (unless the data is in a provider-based app).
ON CONSUMER PRIVACY
(Our goal) is to make that ultimately the patient’s choice, and the patient’s decision. (Patients are) going to go with very trusted brands to (access their data). This is the way market economies work. … In parallel, let’s say you have a very serious, fatal illness, like cystic fibrosis. You’re not going to worry about your privacy … you’re going to be worried: Can I get the data, can I enroll in the clinical trial, can I find out what my options are?
ON HOW APPS COULD REVAMP QUALITY REPORTING
If all these APIs work, the whole reporting of quality measures will, over time, eventually go away. Instead of clinicians having to generate these quality measures in a one-off kind of way, you’ll have an API—an endpoint—and the payers … will be able to get that data and then use modern computing, machine learning technologies, to figure out the qualities.
ON PREDICTING HEALTHCARE’S FUTURE
When you look at what an “app economy” in healthcare might be, it’s actually hard to tell. I don’t think people necessarily thought, before Uber, “If I could combine the feed from a map service, a traffic service, a credit card service and build up a driver service, and then combine that with a consumer front end, I could build a totally new business model of transportation.” We think there are going to be companies doing this in healthcare.