President Barack Obama says interoperability and data-sharing efforts haven’t gone as well as he had hoped they would under his signature healthcare reform law.
In a video interview with Vox, Obama said efforts to cut healthcare costs by reducing readmissions have been a success, fueled by financial incentives, common-sense, low-tech interventions such as follow-up phone calls and bipartisan support for value-based care efforts.
We’ve started to see “some real movement” when we pay for outcomes, he said.
In the interview, he also discussed Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, saying that if they have a better replacement option, he's all for it.
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But sharing data from electronic medical records is an area that hasn’t improved as much as he would have liked.
“We put a big slug of money into trying to encourage everybody to digitize,” he said.
“It’s proven to be harder than we expected, partly because everybody has different systems. They don’t all talk to each other. It requires retraining people … to use them effectively,” he said. “I’m optimistic that over time it’s inevitable that it’s going to get better, because every other part of our lives has become paperless. But it’s been a lot slower than I would have expected.”