Building an Interconnected Digital Foundation
“Now that we’ve got virtually all the hospitals and a majority of ambulatory providers on electronic health records systems, to ask ourselves the question, how do we start thinking of a world where it really is a digital foundation from this point going forward? We haven’t eliminated paper, we haven’t eliminated faxes — God help us — but we know that’s a shrinking, shrinking part of what we’re doing every single day,” said Micky Tripathi, the national coordinator for health IT at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offering an update on federal priorities in interoperability.
He highlighted the importance of creating an open-architecture health IT ecosystem based on open industry standards, which Tripathi said would pave the way for more innovation. And he stressed the importance of connecting public health to healthcare systems’ interoperability.
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, deputy director for public health science and surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shared lessons from the CDC’s data modernization initiative that launched in 2019, including ongoing success in cloud migration.
“Our ultimate goal is to move from siloed and brittle public health data systems to connected, resilient, adaptable and sustainable response-ready systems that can help us solve problems before they happen and reduce the harm caused by the problems that do happen,” Jernigan said.