Trump Administration Wants to Take On Medical Records Puzzle

The Trump administration wants Americans to have greater access to their medical data, a top health official said at a health-technology conference.

The question of how information from medical records can be shared securely with patients and among different health care providers has long vexed the industry. While many health care records have been digitized in the past decade, hospitals and doctors haven’t yet realized broad productivity gains from the transformation.

That’s partly because even digital records are often limited to one health care provider’s system, and competing systems don’t communicate with each other.

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“At a time when health care data is being generated from so many sources, too often that data runs into the hard walls of closed systems that hold patients, and their information, hostage,” said Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in prepared remarks for a Las Vegas conference of health IT professionals on Tuesday.

Verma was scheduled to be introduced by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who leads the White House Office of American Innovation.

The high-profile announcement signals a willingness to tackle a knotty problem past efforts have failed to untangle. A law enacted in 2009 as part of an economic-stimulus package provided billions of dollars in subsidies for health care providers to switch from paper records to electronic software.

That plan, too, envisioned sophisticated networks that could relay patient data seamlessly from a family doctor to a hospital surgeon to a physical therapist. The idea, called “interoperability” in the industry’s jargon, has never become reality on a wide scale. Competing data formats and incentives to hold on to customers led medical-software companies to create systems that don’t talk to each other.