When Americans step into the voting booth (or fill out their mail-in or absentee ballots), many will be aware of how this election could impact healthcare issues like abortion rights or the Medicare trust. But the vast majority won’t realize that this election could affect healthcare data interoperability, pointed out Arcadia CEO Michael Meucci.
“I don’t think that the average American understands how a specific administration’s view on data sharing interoperability directly impacts them,” he declared last week during an interview at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas.
For example, an administration that is supportive of open data sharing could lead to better care continuity, improved outcomes and lower costs. An administration that has a more restrictive approach to data sharing may do a better job of addressing some Americans’ privacy concerns, but it could also lead to fragmented care and slower innovation timelines, Meucci explained.
When it comes to healthcare data interoperability, there is common ground across both sides of the aisle, he noted — both presidential candidates agree that there needs to be more government action to curtail anti-competitive behavior and data blocking.
But they might not see eye-to-eye on how to go about this, Meucci noted.
“There’s been tremendous progress, in my eyes, made over the last three to five years on the launch of the quality health information networks, as well as on TEFCA. But there’s a lot of work still to do,” he explained.
Meucci said that many healthcare organizations “have built a lot of dependency” on federal data sharing regulations that have been established in the past few years — especially provider organizations that rely on these measures to ensure they can treat their patients in a timely manner.
“If we roll that back, we might get sent back to the drawing board of how to drive sustainable, cost-effective and patient centered data exchange,” he remarked.
He added that there’s no guarantee that Kamala Harris, if elected, would continue to advance data sharing policies that require healthcare organizations to cooperate with each other. She is different from Joe Biden, but “we know that there may be some common threads,” Meucci noted.
If Donald Trump gets elected, his administration may want to roll back some of these data sharing requirements in the name of smaller government, though this isn’t certain, he said.
Looking back at Trump’s presidency, there was “a lot of focus on private innovation in healthcare,” Meucci pointed out.
“You saw that with the DCE contract model, and that drove a bunch of private investment and technology innovation in healthcare. I think that on a very optimistic note, I actually think both administrations will be good for continued healthcare innovation,” he declared.
Photo: LeoWolfert, Getty Images
