Today's healthcare relies on digital health ecosystems—a network of interconnected digital services. These ecosystems need to accommodate any type of user to support a variety of digital healthcare use cases and innovation. User types not only include consumers, providers, workforces, and partners, but also connected IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) such as remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices, wearables, and medical equipment. And now in the age of artificial intelligence, users also include AI sessions and agents. Digital health ecosystems also include cloud services and third-party partnerships and application programming interfaces (APIs).

Interoperability is a fundamental pillar within this intricate digital web. As healthcare systems evolve, the seamless exchange of health information across diverse digital ecosystems and stakeholders—such as providers, payers, pharmacies, patients/members—is critical. It's been proven that shared data exchange improves care by informing clinical decisions that result in better patient outcomes.

Healthcare interoperability refers to the ability of different health information technologies to communicate, exchange, and use health information in a coordinated manner, both within and across organizational boundaries, in order to improve healthcare delivery. As discussed below, multiple regulations mandate interoperability. And achieving it is a complex endeavor. For example, interoperability relies on advanced cybersecurity capabilities, a standard called FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) for data formats and APIs, legal agreements for data sharing, and governance models to manage the data exchange of medical records.

Interoperable systems are essential to optimize patient care and streamline healthcare delivery. Health information exchange across digital health ecosystems hinges on secure integrations and access management of clinical data, such as electronic health records (EHRs), across various information systems and interfaces. At the heart of this endeavor lies identity and access management (IAM). Healthcare IAM (also known as healthcare identity management) is a crucial component for both achieving healthcare data interoperability and complying with the regulations that mandate it.

Healthcare Interoperability Regulations and Mandates

To foster interoperability and improve public health, legislative measures have mandated the adoption of interoperability standards and promoted the reduction of information blocking within the healthcare industry. These regulations emphasize that the ability to securely exchange data across open, accessible, and interoperable health information systems is of utmost importance.

Key regulations involved with healthcare interoperability in the U.S. include:

1. 21st Century Cures Act: Aims to enhance innovation and streamline the development and deployment of health technologies. It emphasizes the need for open access to electronic health information and prohibits information blocking.
2. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Sets standards for protecting patient health information, influencing how data is shared and exchanged across platforms securely.
3. HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act): Promotes the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology, significantly electronic health records.
4. Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA): Aims to provide a single "on-ramp" to nationwide connectivity, ensuring secure and seamless data exchange across the healthcare system.
5. ONC Health IT Certification Program: Ensures that health IT meets established standards and functionalities, including interoperability requirements, to improve healthcare quality, efficiency, and patient safety.
6. ONC SMART on FHIR Requirement: An important part of the ONC's 21st Century Cures Act, health IT certification now requires the use of SMART Health IT's Substitutable Medical Applications Reusable Technologies (SMART) standard, and HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, creating what's known as SMART on FHIR.
   
   SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies) provides a framework for developing healthcare applications that can operate within various healthcare IT systems, ensuring these apps are interoperable and can access data as needed. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a standard describing data formats and elements (resources) for exchanging electronic health records (EHRs). Together, SMART on FHIR enables the creation of interoperable healthcare applications that securely access and work with data across different EHR systems, enhancing patient care and healthcare efficiency.

These regulations collectively aim to ensure that healthcare data is accessible, secure, and efficiently exchanged across different health IT systems, enhancing patient care and the healthcare system's overall efficiency.

To meet interoperability regulations and their unique mandates requires a unified healthcare identity management platform purpose-built for the complexities of enterprise healthcare organizations.

The Role of Healthcare IAM in Interoperability

Enterprise-grade healthcare IAM platforms (also known as healthcare identity management platforms), such as Ping Identity's, make interoperability initiatives a reality by ensuring smooth real-time data sharing across different healthcare information systems and regions. They also allow a format for secure and seamless integration across multiple identity systems, improving efficiency and reducing vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. This is vital to securely share patient information across stakeholder healthcare organizations.

Here are some key capabilities that a healthcare IAM platform should include to help healthcare professionals achieve interoperability:

• Identity Verification: Advanced healthcare identity management platforms, such as Ping Identity's, are able to verify the identities of all stakeholders—such as patients, members, executors, help-desk employees, care providers, and so on—across the entire user journey. Identity verification is crucial for securing electronic health records, ensuring privacy, and facilitating health information exchange (HIE) in compliance with interoperability regulations.

• Authentication and Authorization: Healthcare identity management is the foundation for secure and reliable access to sensitive health information. For example, it ensures that only authorized users such as a clinician can access patient data. Enterprise-grade healthcare IAM provides robust mechanisms for authenticating users and ensuring they are authorized to access specific data. This includes secure login processes and context-aware access control for data, services, and transactions that are compliant with healthcare regulations like HIPAA.
• No-Code/Low-Code Identity Orchestration: No-code identity orchestration enables IT teams to quickly boost levels of interoperability and integration by eliminating administrative burdens. Using Ping Identity's orchestration engine DaVinci, IT professionals can quickly integrate various applications and services using a drag-and-drop workflow interface without the need for extensive coding. This simplicity accelerates system integration across hybrid IT architectures. This includes EHRs, patient management systems, marketing and communications solutions, billing platforms, disparate healthcare identity management systems, and more.
• Integrate new products and services with speed and precision
• Streamline multi-vendor architectures without custom coding
• Explore new ways to engage users and optimize workflows with minimal disruption
• Scalability and Management: An enterprise-grade healthcare IAM platform helps manage ever-growing numbers of users and IoMT identities and their access rights—seamlessly scaling as system and app usage increases. For instance, Availity, one of the nation's largest health information networks, uses Ping to manage and route millions of transactions a day. Overall, Ping Identity manages and secures over 8 billion identities globally. This type of scale is crucial in healthcare identity management settings where the number of users and the complexity of their relationships and roles can expand rapidly. For example, managing the relationship of a remote patient monitoring (RPM) IoMT device identity to the identities of a specific care provider, a parent, and the dependent child patient using that device.
• Security: Enterprise-grade healthcare identity management platforms, like Ping's, include advanced security features to protect all user types—patients, members, employees, contractors, partners, and even IoMT devices. Advanced healthcare IAM includes security capabilities like identity verification, passwordless and multi-factor authentication (MFA), risk-based authentication, user behavior analytics, and fraud prevention—all of which are important for protecting sensitive health information. These capabilities and others support a Zero Trust security framework that helps ensure interoperability initiatives won't increase an organization's risk posture.

• Regulatory Compliance: Healthcare identity management solutions also help organizations achieve interoperability, security, and privacy regulatory compliance. This includes making sure that applications, such as SMART on FHIR apps, are compliant by enforcing the appropriate access controls, audit trails, and data security measures.

All of the enterprise-grade healthcare identity management and IAM capabilities mentioned above (and more) are crucial for meeting interoperability regulations like HIPAA, HITECH, TEFCA, and the 21st Century Cures Act. This is because healthcare identity management platforms ensure secure integration, data exchange, and access controls. Without these capabilities, healthcare organizations would struggle with data breaches, inefficiencies, and non-compliance penalties.

1. Optimize experiences and security when engaging with users
2. Reduce time to market by rapid integration into applications
3. Maintain agility to enable continuous digital innovation for your business

Future-Proof Your Interoperability Initiatives With Ping Identity Healthcare Identity Management

As the healthcare ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, the importance of healthcare IAM-enabled interoperability becomes ever more apparent. The leading healthcare provider, payer, and life science organizations partner with Ping Identity to build digital health ecosystems that are more connected, efficient, and responsive to the needs of their consumers and healthcare professionals alike.

Learn how to unlock the full potential of interoperability with healthcare identity management purpose-built for business growth by downloading Beyond Compliance: Using IAM to Surpass the Healthcare Interoperability Status Quo.