Traditional brick-and-mortar health care organizations and digital health companies are actively partnering to provide novel, digitally enabled care models to patients. Despite the potential of these new care models, it is critical that they do not inadvertently increase fragmentation of health care services and instead work to promote seamless and safe data exchange. As highlighted in the AMA Future of Health report, optimizing technologies and policies that reduce fragmentation are key to enabling the effectiveness of digitally enabled care for patients, providers and caregivers.

Seamless and secure data exchange that prioritizes the surfacing of critical and actionable insights early, often, and in an accessible format is vital for digitally enabled care. It allows clinicians to have a window into the care their patients receive outside of their office, it enables patients to receive timely, coordinated, and connected care, and it reduces duplicative or unnecessary tasks for administrative staff. Leaders shared that barriers to seamless data sharing and interoperability are no longer primarily technical in nature, given significant advances in standards development and health information exchange platforms. Instead, organizations experience cultural and operational roadblocks that stand in the way of meaningful data exchange and purposeful utilization of clinical information

This issue brief provides practical guidance for clinical data sharing, leveraging real-world examples of organizations that have succeeded in establishing relationships between digital health solutions and their traditional in-person clinics.

To read the issue brief, click here.