Becker's ASC Review

42 HEALTHCARE NEWS 42 Can Trump finally 'kill the clipboard' in healthcare? By Giles Bruce e Trump administration has promised to fix interoperability and eliminate the need for clipboards in healthcare once and for all. Will the plan work? "Today, the dream of easily transportable, electronic medical records finally becomes a reality," President Donald Trump said at a July 30 White House event unveiling his interoperability project. "Healthcare providers across the country will also finally be able to kill the clipboard. … Instead of filling out the same tedious paperwork at every medical appointment, patients will simply be able to grant their doctors access to their records at the push of a button." Health system CIOs told Becker's that they applaud the vision but question the ability to execute. "e new interoperability push is effective in its market-driven approach, bringing together major tech and health IT companies to create a voluntary framework," said Zafar Chaudry, MD, senior vice president and chief digital, AI and information officer of Seattle Children's. "is commitment to patient-centric tools like QR-code sharing and conversational AI could truly empower individuals and streamline processes." e gap that remains is patient privacy, he noted. Once a patient's data is shared with a third-party app, it oen loses HIPAA protections. "Without a comprehensive, federal privacy law to govern these digital health tools, we risk a privacy paradox, where the very tools designed to help patients could expose their sensitive information to new risks," Dr. Chaudry said. John Henderson, vice president and chief information and digital officer of San Diego-based Rady Children's Health, said the initiative's goals are "undeniably noble," but noted that previous administrations have tried to solve interoperability — starting with the HITECH Act of 2009 — to no avail. "Billions have been spent, and yet the needle has barely moved," he said. And many of the same companies that signed onto this plan have participated in previous efforts, he noted. "While their involvement is promising on paper, history tells us that pledges from Big Tech don't always translate into meaningful outcomes," he said. Mr. Henderson added that interoperability is not a "tech problem." Rather, it's a "deeply rooted issue involving legacy infrastructure, fragmented standards, privacy concerns, misaligned incentives and placing the burden of interoperability on each healthcare facility while the technology vendors continue to make minimal advancements that are meaningful for the patient and provider health system." "rowing money and technology at it, without a nuanced understanding of these dynamics, doesn't make the goal more achievable — nor does it increase the probability of success," he said. "Moreover, the initiative's reliance on voluntary criteria and vague implementation timelines raises concerns. As CIOs, we've seen firsthand how well-intentioned frameworks can falter without clear accountability, robust governance, and sustained stakeholder engagement." Curtis Cole, MD, vice president and chief global information officer of Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University, said he's "hopeful that something positive" will come from the plan, but he's not "particularly sanguine." "A lot of it looks like the all-too-frequent use of computers to make bad processes work faster, rather than fixing the fundamental problem," he said. He pointed to the lack of a national patient identifier, which other developed nations have. e Trump administration is advocating for digital identity verification to link patients to their records, but Dr. Cole says those systems oen have incorrect or incomplete information. "Ironically, the reason we don't have a patient identifier is because it used to be that conservatives were afraid of big government … and they were afraid the government was going to use the data, and now we've got the worst of both worlds," he said, pointing to CMS allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to access patients' Medicaid information. "We don't have a patient identifier, and we have a government that is itself violating healthcare protections." e Trump administration has also pledged to make it easier for patients to access their past claims and prior authorizations, as well as streamline the claims process for payers. "It misses the real point that we need to get rid of unnecessary prior Image Credit: Adobe Stock

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