White House, Tech Leaders Commit to Create Patient-Centric Healthcare Ecosystem

The Administration just announced a new initiative that has the potential shake up the hashtag#healthtech space. By partnering with companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and OpenAI to create a more patient-centric healthcare system, they again demonstrate openness to embrace market led solutions vs. a 'government knows best' mentality.

Here's a link to the announcement from CMS.
 
For those of us who’ve been in the healthcare tech world for a while, we know how much of a roadblock EMR systems like Epic have been. Made mandatory by the ACA in 2013, they're notoriously hard to work with - both technically and from a business standpoint - and because EMR integration has been a non-negotiable prerequisite for doing business with hospitals, have made it insanely difficult for startups to get their foot in the door. The costs, the red tape, the time it takes to even get a conversation started have all been huge barriers to innovation.
 
For example, HL7 FHIR was introduced in 2012. While it was developed to address API standardization for interoperability, it's done little to mitigate the massive barriers that EMR platforms still present to innovators and startups. And, healthcare system's general bias for platform breadth vs. point solutions adds even more friction.

What excites me most about this, though, is the pivot to a patient-first perspective vs. an industry controlled initiative. Yes, data privacy is critical - even more so in a data portability scenario - but the technology exists to address those risks. It's not a new idea - there's been talk for years about 'patients own their data', but precious little progress to make that happen. Case in point - Apple introduced its Health Records feature in 2018, but in the 7 years since, less than 10% of hospitals have opened up their EMRs to the 150M+ iPhone users in the US.
 
The reality is that the technology isn't the hard part here. I worry that, as has been the case for decades, the primary challenges to this kind of innovation will come both from incumbents like Epic who will be loathe to give up their death grip on patient data, and from the healthcare systems themselves who will similarly see data portability as a threat to their ability to manage & control their relationships with patients. Objections will likely be contextualized under the guise of data security and patient confidentiality...shrieks of what about HIPAA?!?!?!?!?....but the real fear is neither of those.
 
So call me cautiously optimistic. This initiative could help tear down the walls that have kept so many entrepreneurs and investors on the sidelines of the healthcare space and represent a big step toward creating a more open, innovative environment in healthcare. Or it could be much ado about very little in reality, just like HL7 FHIR. We'll see what happens...