Although it's taken a bit longer for healthcare data than other aspects of modern life, most providers today have crossed the digital rubicon. HealthCare Business News spoke to Shannon West, chief product officer at Ciox, to learn about what this means for the state of patient access to medical records.

HCB News: What social or policy trends spurred the recent push for patients to have more access to their medical records?
Shannon West: There are four significant pieces of policy that ensure and protect patient’s access to their medical records.
1. The HIPAA Privacy Rule was the original regulation that ensured patients could access their medical records. It was the first time we affirmed as a country that patients had a right to access their own information.

2. In recent years, there have been additional policies that reaffirm this right to patient access. A portion of the Cures Act focuses on information blocking, ensuring penalties are imposed on providers or covered entities if patients cannot access their medical records.
3. Additionally the Cures Act includes specifications that ensure patients can access their records in a usable electronic format. In a world where we all have smartphones, the last thing a patient wants is to receive their protected health information via fax.
4. Finally, the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule focuses on driving interoperability and patient access to health information, and gives patients access to their health information when needed in a way they can best use it.
Taken together, these policies ensure that patients not only have access, but should have access to a convenient and digital format of their record.

HCB News: What is data fragmentation and how does it relate to the larger conversation around interoperability? Why is it an important problem to solve?
SW: Data fragmentation is the concept that healthcare data for the same person or population lives in many separate places that do not interact or integrate. Proprietary, provider-specific medical notes and records are stored in multiple formats across a single healthcare system. Meaning even if you see a set of doctors inside one health system, your health information might live in numerous – up to 25 or more – EMRs.

Across providers, we moved from paper to digital filing cabinets, creating an obvious barrier to sharing two sets of equally important information. That's where the need to seamlessly share data between these systems comes into play: health data lives everywhere, and combining it into a single consumable medical record is extremely difficult. Connectivity between these systems and common standards should allow us to seamlessly share important health information, like clinical data in care settings or between a health insurance company and a provider. As an industry we often talk about this as interoperability but putting more definition around that term is key – we don’t just need two systems to talk, we need them to share information in a usable way for end users which means we need technical and semantic interoperability!

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