Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

ONC chief Don Rucker on the current state and 'next frontier' of interoperability

Healthcare IT News: Healthcare has been striving for the Holy Grail of sweeping, seamless, semantic interoperability for a very long time. Progress has been achieved over the past decade, but it's been in fits and starts, and after many years of well-meaning policy prescriptions, too many major stakeholders – whether they're health systems, payers or vendors – still cling to old ways of doing business and often jealously guard the data they've amassed.

As Healthcare IT News puts a spotlight on interoperability this month, taking stock of how the industry is doing with its data sharing, it's worth asking just where we are, 10 years after the HITECH Act set the basic table stakes of health information technology with $36 billion in federal incentive money.

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