New data is now available for public use that helps inform the history and current state of the certified health IT market. In this blog post, which is part of our brand-new Digital Dividends series, we look into that.
Hospital and Clinician use of Certified Health IT
ASTP/ONC and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) coordinated the release of new 2023 data on the certified health IT used by hospitals and clinicians for participation in the Medicare Promoting Interoperability (PI) Program and the Promoting Interoperability performance category of the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, respectively. Eligible hospitals and eligible clinicians use certified electronic health record technology to meet annual program requirements.
For hospitals, only 2023 data are currently available, but we look forward to coordinating on future releases soon. For clinicians, 2023 data is now available, along with data from 2019-2022. The ONC Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL) and Medicare PI Program and Merit-based Incentive Payment System data are combined in the datasets to link hospital and clinician participants with the particular certified technologies that are reported for each performance year. Each dataset includes hospital and clinician identifiers, so they can be further linked to other health care datasets that can enrich and broaden their use.
Hospitals’ Participation in Health Information Networks
We support the annual distribution of the Information Technology Supplement to the AHA Annual Survey of US hospitals through our partnership with the American Hospital Association (AHA). The supplement has long asked hospitals about their participation in health information networks, including regional, state, and local health information exchange organizations (HIEs); national networks; EHR vendor networks; and, now, active and planned participation in a Qualified Health Information Network®, as part of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement™.
We’re pleased to make a new dataset available that pools hospital responses to these relevant questions from 2022-2024, representing each hospital’s most recent report of participation in these various networks. In all, over 3,000 non-federal acute care hospitals are included across these 3 years of survey data. Given that this is pooled survey data and does not represent a census of hospitals, data users should be aware of non-response bias when generalizing the data because the dataset includes hospital identifiers to facilitate data linkages. We hope this dataset encourages interest in the larger IT Supplement data, which is available through the AHA, and includes a larger set of topics, including hospitals’ use of artificial intelligence, health information exchange partners, information blocking, and more. The data could also be linked to the above PI Program dataset to generate insights across both sets of data.
New and Historic Data on Health App Marketplaces
Beginning in 2019, ASTP/ONC began studies of various public-facing app marketplaces (or galleries) hosted by both EHR companies and innovative organizations. An initial baseline understanding of how many businesses were actively pursuing integrations with EHRs and developing innovative applications to enhance the ecosystem of applications and services available to EHR users was presented in the initial findings of our study, which we published. We now provide a new dataset of the list of apps and software applications discovered via these sources for years 2019-2025 for public use. The dataset represents a “snapshot” of all the apps featured at these data sources for each of the years, and contains information pulled directly from each website, including application name, developer name, and application description. We’ve long used this project to study the emergence of new technology (even the first ambient scribe) and in what ways health care innovators, start-ups, and digital health companies are delivering new technologies that can help solve and improve health tech’s (and health care’s) biggest challenges. We believe the time is right—and the data robust enough—to make the dataset available to the entire community for its use and exploration. This data continues to inform ASTP/ONC’s work, including additional studies on digital health company experiences with APIs.
New Data, New Possibilities
We hope this data encourages innovative use, thoughtful questions, and bottom-up approaches to understand these areas of the health IT market. Be on the lookout for future data updates! This is just the beginning of more insights and data for public use coming your way in 2025 and beyond.
