While there is growing recognition that our health is affected by much more than what happens within the health care system, collaboration between the health care system and other sectors remains a challenge. AcademyHealth has been proud to work with people from across sectors – including community-based organizations, businesses, and government agencies – in an effort to improve population health. Our latest initiative relates to one particularly thorny barrier to collaboration: sharing data among sectors.
In partnership with Stewards of Change Institute, we’re building the National Interoperability Collaborative (NIC) to increase collaboration among the sectors that impact health and well-being by improving information-sharing, interoperability, and use of technology. We’ve been busy since our launch last June, engaging with others to join us and creating space – both virtually and in person – for conversation and collaboration. It’s been energizing to see the work on data sharing happening through on-the-ground in initiatives like the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust as well as seeing how interoperability can be leveraged to address critical public health crises such as the opioid epidemic.
You can read more about what we’ve been up to (as well as find information about how to join NIC) in a recent Stewards of Change blog post authored by me and my co-PI Daniel Stein here. I hope the post will give you a glimpse of our vision and how advances in interoperability will have broad benefits, particularly for at-risk members of society who are often being served by several different sectors that could be doing a lot more to communicate with each other. Our hope is that NIC will help to facilitate those important conversations, and we hope you will join us.