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 Today in health it, the story is Cerner and New York Life betrayal or good for the patient. Sometimes the stories just come to me and sometimes the stories happen to me. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current.

And engaged. I wanna thank our sponsor for today's Serious Healthcare. They reached out to me about this time last year and said we'd love what you're doing and really appreciate your mission to develop the next generation of health IT leaders. The rest is history as they say. And if you wanna be a part of our mission and wanna support our show, please shoot me a note at partner at this week in health it.com.

Alright, here's today's story. I got into a little back and forth with uh, Patty p Manon and followers yesterday on LinkedIn regarding this story. And I'll come back to that back and forth in just a minute. The story comes from healthcare IT news. It is Cerner makes a move into the life insurance game.

Let me just read some of the article to give you context. EHR vendors. Cerner announced on Wednesday that it was collaborating with New York Life to provide secure access to EHRs. The partnership represents a move into the life insurance industry from Cerner aimed at accelerating underwriting decisions and simplifying the application process.

We focus on helping life insurance companies return underwriting decisions quickly and accurately with near real-time. Digital record delivery from across the country said Art Glasgow, senior Vice President of Strategic Growth at Cerner. In a statement I. Why it matters. As you know, healthcare IT news, they, they do the why it matters section.

Almost a so what if you will. The collaboration aims to support New York Life in accelerating hospital's, EHRs in near real time with patient consent according to the companies. Another goal is to make it easier, . For individuals to apply for life insurance while also easing the administration burden on healthcare providers.

These efforts are an important part of New York Life's ongoing drive to leverage digital health data to accelerate life insurance. Underwritings at Alex Cook head of strategic capabilities for New York Life. With the support of these innovations, New York Life has reduced application processing time and streamlined the process.

If you've listened to this show or this week in health, it, you know that I believe the ownership of the health record should be transferred to the patient today by way of very fuzzy laws across the board. The health record is the property of the creator of the record, which in most cases is the health system.

I believe that the value of the health record and the sale of that data in the record should be owned and controlled by the patient. And value derived by any sharing should be accrued to the patient. We have a long way to go on this. If you remember when Major health systems announced Tru Veta. Which my data happens to be a part of actually.

Uh, I, I gave the new startup three suggestions, and one of those suggestions was to ask me for permission to move my data around a suggestion that I don't have much hope of coming to pass since the unicorn status of this startup is, is really predicated on the value of that data. They've created and collected over the years.

Some of the CEOs of the health systems that are participating in Truda have publicly stated that the health record should belong to the patient in the past, but that isn't likely to be how Truda operates, and it's not gonna be reflected in how Truda operates. Along comes Cerner, a New York life arrangement, and I had to think about this one a bit because they are following my advice and the value is accruing to me.

The patient as well as others, but at least some of the value is accruing to me. You see, Cerner and New York Life are building a pipe to facilitate the transfer of the data that is normally done via paper. I have to make a request from the HIM department. I get my paper records, and I deliver them over to New York Life.

You know, this is bad for me. It's bad for the health system and it's bad for New York life. It's very inefficient. So along comes the pipe, along comes the link that they're creating, which has two elements. I'm looking for patient directed sharing of information. I. I decide if New York Life gets the information not Cerner or New York life and I gain value in the currency of my time and convenience, the information will flow without the arduous process of paper requests.

The dissent on the LinkedIn back and forth seems to stem from the belief that this is going to be used to collect and use information in ways . That do not benefit the patient. While larger companies benefit, they are putting Cerner in the surveillance economy. Surveillance companies like Facebook and Google amongst others, collect information about us and then use and sell that information to fund their gazillion dollar valuations.

My argument is that this announcement doesn't put Cerner in that category. Their revenues clearly derived from the value they provide to health systems. This is a working partnership with New York Life where they might derive some value, but it's eyes wide open kind of stuff. If they do receive any value, it will come from New York Life, which will benefit greatly from reducing the friction of this process and therefore increase clients and reduce the waste associated with dealing with paper records.

But here is the biggest factor to consider. The whole transaction is done at the request of the patient. We have control, we have the levers in our hands. We can choose to forego this process and opt for the paper process if we choose. That choice is everything. Patient directed. Interoperability is the first domino that needs to fall in the rehabilitation of a broken healthcare system.

Alright, that's all for today. I'd love to know what you think. Check out the discussion on LinkedIn. In fact, participate, I generate a post for each one of these episodes and I'd love to hear your thoughts. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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