HHS exploring how to bolster medical imaging exchange across healthcare ecosystem
Health and Human Services is exploring how to bolster the exchange of medical images and wants to hear from the field in the process.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which is part of HHS, recently released a call for public comment on the work of radiologists. It’s interested to hear about ways to “better enable the access, exchange and use of diagnostic images by healthcare providers and patients.”
HHS for years has sought to bolster interoperability across the field. As part of this push, the agency is now exploring how new standards and certification criteria can better support the exchange of diagnostic images.
“Behind every image is a patient waiting for answers. Ensuring those images move seamlessly between care teams means those answers can come faster, with greater accuracy and at a lower cost,” Thomas Keane, MD, MBA, a radiologist who was named national coordinator for health IT last summer, wrote in a blog post shared Jan. 29. “We want to know how we can make diagnostic images more accessible to the providers and patients who need them. Let us know what is working, what is not and how an optimal, yet unrealized, future state can be architected by regulation, reimbursement and private sector coordination.”
HHS will be accepting comments for 45 days, with feedback due by March 16. Responses will help inform potential new standards and certification criteria, which would be spelled out in possible future rulemaking, Keane noted.
The American College of Radiology also highlighted the HHS request for information in its own news post, published Jan. 29. ACR noted that the objective is to determine whether “the agency’s regulations related to EHR certification can help advance exchange of information without reliance on discs or other physical media.” The college has previously encouraged HHS to work with radiologists and other stakeholders to modernize image sharing using “existing radiology IT standards and regulatory authorities.”
ACR CEO Dana Smetherman, MD, MBA, previously discussed its advocacy on this issue in an interview with Radiology Business last year. In the modern electronic era where consumers have instant access to everything from news to online shopping, banking, and weather, most patients are shocked to find their doctors cannot quickly view their medical imaging.
"Many are surprised we still don't have standards and requirements that allow all of those systems to talk to each other," Smetherman said. "As a practicing physician, I had patients who would come for a screening mammogram, but they had never been to our facility, and they were astounded we couldn't just pull up on a computer the images from her previous mammograms and compare them. Things have not really been optimized so that all these IT systems are speaking the same language to enable a nice seamless transfer.”
You can find the full request for information in the Federal Register here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.