Articles, Updates, and Announcements

It is too hard for patients to get access to their medical records today. Regulations going into effect this year from the 21st Century Cures Act, combined with the growing digitization of health records, are set to change this paradigm. Today, Ciox (a Datavant company) is announcing a comprehensive solution to enable providers to comply with upcoming 21st Century Cures Act milestones. This post provides more context on the current state of the patient request workflow, and how the future looks different.

In the last several decades, there have been at least 100 initiatives and companies that have attempted to solve interoperability in healthcare. Yet the fax machine still rules the industry — what went wrong, and how can the industry solve this?

Co-authored by Niall Brennan, Mark Cullen, and Travis May. Mr. Brennan is the CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute and former Chief Data Officer of CMS. Dr. Cullen is a former Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and led the Center for Population Health Sciences. Mr. May is Founder & President of Datavant.

In a 2018 piece on why American medicine still runs on fax machines, Vox explained why the last decade of US government efforts to automate health data exchange had shown limited results. Earlier this month, new rules went into effect focused on making it easier for patients to access their health information and to exchange data across electronic health record systems and payers. Here, we explain why the fax machine continues to be such a formidable opponent.