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Remarks to the Press on Health Interoperability Final Rules

Alex M. Azar II
Press
March 9, 2020
Washington, D.C.

These actions by President Trump are a bold new way of thinking about government in healthcare. We're laying down simple rules of the road that will put the patient in control, empower providers to coordinate, and pay for outcomes. All together, these steps will dramatically improve American patients’ experience in healthcare—they’ll deliver the American patient lower costs, less paperwork, more options, and more control.

As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you everyone for joining us for this important announcement.

This announcement is a significant piece of working towards President Trump's healthcare vision: an affordable, patient-centric system that puts you in control, and treats you like a person, not a number.

The driving force behind the President's healthcare work is to protect what works and make it better. In more tangible terms, here's what that means: We're going to protect your ability to choose the insurance plans and providers that work for you. We're going to protect what Americans like about that experience, but deliver that experience with lower costs, less paperwork, more options, and more control.

The final rules we're announcing today will help deliver on all four of those goals. Today, after tens of billions of dollars invested in digitizing health records, America's health records system remains balkanized and nearly inaccessible to the patient. We talk a lot about how we love having a choice of doctors—but how can you shop for better options if you can't practically bring your records with you? Today, Americans' health records are shackled by a broken system, which means their options are limited, too.

Many Americans know how frustrating health records can be today. I'm the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and even I've struggled to get my health records electronically.

Frankly, the stories we heard in developing the interoperability rules were even more frustrating than we expected.

In response to our draft rule, we heard from patients whose experiences with the broken status quo were not only maddening—they were harmful to their health. We heard about one woman who was on a trip when she developed a kidney stone, for which she needed emergency surgery. But first, she had to obtain her records from her hometown urologist, who had to fax them and mail CDs—delaying her surgery for four days.

We've heard from patients who are working to get second opinions and more options for challenging cases of cancer or their children with rare diseases, who have to devote huge amounts of their precious energies to pressing doctors for CDs and paper records of their health data.

We heard from a physician who helps coordinate care for his 93-year-old mother, who lives 200 miles away, and visits as many as six different practices in a given year—which are on a variety of electronic health record systems. None of those systems keeps track of a single, unified list of medications—which, of course, is a key piece his mother getting the care she needs.

So, how are we going to fix this? Simply put, healthcare providers will be required to provide easy, digital access to your records at no cost. Through what are known as application programming interfaces, or APIs, you will be able to use a smartphone app to have all your health records and your health claims data at hand, for use by you and your doctors. Today, all that time patients are spending to assemble hard copies of their records, and all that time providers are taking to send faxes and CDs, can be replaced with the work of an app that seamlessly gathers and retains all that information.

We believe that's just the beginning. We hope to see a whole ecosystem of condition- or disease-specific apps to help patients monitor and improve their health in real time, in part by using data made available from their EHR via an API. We have apps today that can help patients monitor one particular data point, like glucose levels, but they can't easily help the patient understand their whole health picture—and that's what truly puts the patient in control.

This will be accomplished by the Cures Act Final Rule from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and an interoperability rule unleashing claims data from CMS. I also want to emphasize that we're taking these actions while maintaining and strengthening patient privacy protections. Patient privacy should never stand in the way of patient control.

The wonky term for what we're requiring is interoperability. Practically, from the patient's perspective, these rules mean access and portability. You will have access to your records, and your records will be portable from doctor to doctor.

Providing patients with access to their data makes it much easier for them to control their own care, and we believe there will be opportunities for other data to be incorporated in the apps patients will use alongside. That's where President Trump's bold actions on price transparency and quality are going to be essential, too. Today's announcement also works to empower your doctors to better coordinate your care, including by requiring that providers send notifications to other relevant providers when you're admitted, transferred, or discharged from a provider.

These actions by President Trump are a bold new way of thinking about government in healthcare. We're laying down simple rules of the road that will put the patient in control, empower providers to coordinate, and pay for outcomes. All together, these steps will dramatically improve American patients' experience in healthcare—they'll deliver the American patient lower costs, less paperwork, more options, and more control.

With that, I want to hand things over to Dr. Rucker, to explain more about ONC's rule and the background behind it.

Content created by Speechwriting and Editorial Division 
Content last reviewed on March 9, 2020