Health Care Data Wars: Stretching the Regulations on Information Blocking and The New Burdens of AI

One of the key goals of health care reform, going back to HIPAA in 1996 and particularly the HITECH act of 2009, is to allow the free flow of patient data in a secure and privacy-preserving way. Health care reformers pushed for these bills, knowing that billions of dollars were being wasted while patients were languishing because each health care provider failed to share data with others.Most barriers to data sharing were built into technology and institutions. APIs such as promoted by Amazon.com in retail were simply missing in health care. Documents between different organizations were incompatible, even if the organizations claimed to comply to standards such as HL7. Patients were reduced to taking a cart to the doctor’s office and loading it with paper copies of their records (or more recently, with a CD), often after payment of an outrageous copying fee.