ONC’s Micky Tripathi and Microsoft’s Greg Moore on health data interoperability from Health Evolution on Vimeo.
Discussion: Securing Data Advantage
Discussion Leaders:
Greg Moore, MD, PhD, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health
Micky Tripathi, PhD, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Topics/quotes:
On health data interoperability and FHIR
Tripathi: “We have value-adding things that we want to be able to do that interoperability will fuel, and that’s what we want to get to is to have that focus be on that and not on the pipes. Unfortunately, we have to build the pipes. So, we have to do that work, but that’s what I want to do, that’s the vision, is to get us to that point.”
Moore: “Even throughout my own career in big tech, I have never seen the momentum that we’re seeing now, payers, providers, biotech, life sciences, large pharma, really moving forward with concrete examples of adoption and moving entire platforms over. Our own health care APIs were actually enabled by FHIR and with the pandemic, this saw incredibly rapid adoption there that I would not have foreseen 18 months ago, and even implementations happening overnight or within a few days at scale.”
Tripathi: “We’ve done a ton of work from an ONC perspective to say, ‘We need those open APIs. We need the EHR vendors and the providers to make those available.’ And now what we need is for the app ecosystem to be able to take advantage of the platform economics that are going to be supported in the platform technical models, and then create all the kinds of rich functionality that only the private sector and the innovators can really figure out and have people use.”
On health data’s role in addressing inequality
Moore: “One of the things we’ve seen in the pandemic, unfortunately, is health inequities being highlighted even more. Your health care outcome is determined by your zip code often, and that’s unfortunate. But I think this is also an opportunity for us all to lean in here and to address that. Data is at the core here.”
Tripathi: “At ONC, what we’re doing is fleshing out a concept that we’re calling ‘health equity by design.’ I think many people will recognize that as kind of a paradigm that we’ve seen in software development: privacy by design, safety by design, security by design. And we’re thinking hard about what would it mean to say that health equity ought to be a core design principle?”
