HHS health IT chief hints at a new approach to EHR certification

Mario Aguilar covers technology in health care, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, telehealth, and digital therapeutics. His stories explore how tech is changing the practice of health care and the business and policy challenges to realizing tech’s promise. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

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At a health care AI summit in Washington D.C. yesterday, heavy hitters weighed in on the prospects for interoperability — the effort to make health data currently scattered about the health care system more readily accessible to patients, their providers, and maybe even researchers. A few comments of note:

• This was news to me: Thomas Keane who is the top health IT regulator at HHS said that before Christmas his office hopes to introduce a rule that would eliminate 34 certification criteria for electronic medical records and modify seven. These certification criteria have been much maligned for various reasons including that they create a huge burden on small companies that might want to compete with dominant vendors like Epic Systems. 
• “We would like the EHR companies to have to do less conformance testing and concern themselves less with this aspect of our regulatory regime,” said Keane. “What we will pivot towards in the spring is regulating the application programming interfaces by which the EHRs talk to each other. And we can say that you have to adopt these features, you have to support this functionality, and if that functionality exists, then these EHRs and other technological applications in the ecosystem should all be able to talk to each other.”
• Investor Vijay Pande has resurfaced following his exit from Andreessen Horowitz‘s Bio & Health team earlier this year. He now has a new healthcare AI fund called VZ.VC that he’s not really ready to talk about yet, even though it’s on his LinkedIn profile.
• Pande offered an intentionally provocative take on the prospects for interoperability: “I think it’s never going to happen. I think there’s not enough market forces to drive that… I think there’s reasons why we haven’t seen it — It’s not the technology.” 

Debate on state AI laws heats up

The health AI summit — where I spent most of yesterday a stone’s throw from the White House — was headlined by deputy health secretary Jim O’Neill. I wrapped up a number of his comments in a story, but most provocative was what he didn’t say: When event host Joe Grogan asked about a controversial proposal to prevent states from enforcing their AI laws, O’Neill demurred, saying only that in general he supported fighting state regulation on AI.