Premier Statement on NAM report: Procuring Interoperability

-By Blair Childs, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs, Premier Inc

Members of Premier commend the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for taking an in-depth look at the ongoing challenges associated with achieving interoperability in health information technology (HIT). To get to nationwide interoperability, there is a desperate need for consistently implemented standards, publicly available application programming interfaces and low barriers to entry for app developers so that data can be extracted from and transmitted to the electronic health record and into clinical workflow. While there are many recommendations in the report that merit further examination, we believe that government needs to step in and implement interoperability and data standards, as called for in the 21st Century Cures Act.