mandated by the government. Congressional attention would be best served in directing ONC to drive greater standards adoption and consistency of implementation of those standards, rather than focusing on the need for all new standards.
Further, it is important to witness what innovation comes from the private sector, generally, in response to the recent legislative and regulatory activity, as well as client requests. There are exciting technologies and services in development now and on the product roadmaps for the next several years based on what our clients have requested of us, and I think we can all agree that we want to avoid a prescriptive, heavy-handed statutory or regulatory mandate in which the government becomes the de facto product manager for our industry as a whole.
Another important consideration in this conversation about information liquidity are the physician practices (small and large) and independent hospitals who have been pressured to move off of their current Electronic Health Record system - Allscripts in some cases - to one used by the large enterprise health system in their area. Sometimes the change is compelled through conversations about referrals, for example; threats not to include people in data networks; or even just a steady drumbeat of pressure, and it?s often done under the auspices of increased interoperability.
In actuality, with today?s technology, changing systems just isn?t necessary in order to provide physicians and other medical professionals with access to the information they need. The rip-and- replace strategy emphasized by some in the industry is many years outdated given the advanced data exchange capabilities that are out there. Allscripts? dbMotion platform provides an advanced semantic engine that aggregates and normalizes all clinical content across a connected community into a single view, accessible within whichever EHR the provider uses, to enable them to find relevant information quickly while with the patient. This technology is in use across numerous communities in the U.S. and overseas, including the entire country of Israel, and in each environment, it?s connecting dozens of different vendors successfully and directly changing the care decisions being made because of the additional information that?s available.
Many people have termed what I just described ? the pressure to change systems ? as data bullying; others, data blocking because one involved party isn?t committed to establishing connectivity between current systems and in some instances, will even put up indirect roadblocks. This raises what I believe to be a fundamentally important issue ? what, exactly, is the definition of data
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