LAS VEGAS – Health care data interoperability should get a huge boost under a public-private effort announced Feb. 29 by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell.

The nation’s top five health care systems and companies, which provide the electronic health record systems that cover more than 90% of U.S. hospital patients, have agreed to principles designed to improve patient access to health data and eliminate the practice of data blocking.

They also have agreed to adopt federally recognized, national interoperability standards, Ms. Burwell announced at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

“Technology is not just one leg of our strategy to build a better health care system for our nation – it supports the entire effort,” Ms. Burwell said. “We are working to unlock health care data and information so that providers are better informed and patients and families can access their health care information, making them empowered, active participants in their own care.”

In a show of support, medical specialty societies including the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the American Medical Association also signed on to the commitment.

“We have made tremendous progress to bring health care into the 21st century,” Ms. Burwell said. “In 6 short years, we have tripled the adoption of electronic health records. Today, three-quarters of physicians are using them. And nearly every hospital uses EHRs, meaning that there is now a digital care footprint for almost everyone in this country.”

To unlock all those data and make them useful to health care providers and patients, the health IT companies and health care systems have agreed to the following steps:

• Implement application programming interface (API) technology so that smartphone and tablet apps can be created, facilitating patient use and transfer of their health care data.

• Work so providers can share patient health care data with patients and other providers whenever permitted by law, while not blocking such sharing either intentionally or unintentionally.

• Use the federally recognized Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data standard.

This commitment is a “major step forward” to help patients “not just in one episode, but over the long term,” explained Dr. Karen DeSalvo, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The agreement means the health care system is “on the threshold of a truly historic opportunity to transform quality of care,” she added.

Federal officials have a timeline for progress toward these goals by 2018, Dr. DeSalvo noted. But “the private sector wants to pull that forward and be leaders with us,” she said. “So, our expectation is that the calls and the commitments and the associated actions that these developers have declared will be seeing some changes by the fall.”

To highlight health information technology’s promise, Ms. Burwell shared a story about electronic health records’ use to find children affected by lead pollution in the water supplies of Flint, Mich.

Alerted to the problem by a friend, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha of Hurley Medical Center in Flint tried to determine whether pipe corrosion might leach dangerous levels of lead into the water supply, Ms. Burwell said.

“She knew the danger lead posed and began what she called a ‘crusade’ to find out if it was affecting children,” Ms. Burwell explained. Dr. Hanna-Attisha mined Hurley’s medical records to “compare blood test results from more than 700 children in the area and map home addresses for geographic variations.

“She quickly discovered that the percentage of children in Flint with lead poisoning had doubled, and even tripled, in some neighborhoods,” Burwell said.

If those results had still been on paper, “it would have taken forever to get these results,” she said.

“Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s story shows us the power of putting health care data to work,” Ms. Burwell noted. “It allows us to see the connections in our communities and helps us put patients in the center of their care.”

Dr. David Classen, chief information officer of the patient safety organization Pascal Metrics and an author of a 2011 Institute of Medicine report on health IT and patient safety, applauded the announcement and the commitment from major EHR vendors and hospital systems have signed on.

“That was one of the things [the IOM expert panel] envisioned – a public-private partnership that would really help this. That’s close to optimal in my view.”

But “the devil’s in the details,” said Dr. Classen, associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah. “When it comes to sharing safety information, it’s not just removal of the gag clauses, it’s also the confidentiality clauses, and the intellectual property protections. Those things too can inhibit sharing of safety information. The challenge here is that [EHR vendors] worry that if they’re so interoperable, they convert their proprietary technology into something that could virtually be open source...and everyone can look at it. Those are legitimate concerns.”

Another concern is agreeing on a common alphabet. “Without that, this is not going to work,” he said. “All these vendor products grew up in silos, without standards imposed on them. So naturally, they’re going to have a Tower of Babel, which means most of them aren’t going to be speaking the same language.”

Feds: Major EHR companies will remove interoperability roadblocks