Wes Barker
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Wes Barker's Latest Blog Posts
Digital Dividends Realized: Hospital Patient Engagement Capabilities
Wes Barker | January 13, 2026
“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree long ago.”
This quote from Warren Buffett on investment portfolios could describe the evolution of patient engagement over the past decade. Much like a carefully built portfolio, the dividends from years of investments in health IT continue to emerge. It is useful to take stock of the dividends of our digitization efforts.
New Data on the Certified Health IT Market Now Available
Wes Barker | September 10, 2025
New data is now available for public use that helps inform the history and current state of the certified health IT market. We explore that in this blog post, which is part of our new Digital Dividends blog series.
Read Full Post.A Decade of Data: Progressing Patient-Centric Care through Health IT
Wes Barker | October 31, 2024
Earlier this year we celebrated the 20th birthday of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (hereafter ASTP) and reflected on the transformative impact of health IT on patient care delivery in the US. These developments have been instrumental in creating a more connected and patient-focused health care system, supporting our goal of seamless data exchange between health care providers, and enabling real-time access to critical patient health information.
Read Full Post.Raising the Bar on Interoperability – A Decade of Data Show that “Sometimes” Isn’t Good Enough
Wes Barker | June 17, 2024
A decade ago, as EHRs were rapidly implemented across the country, ONC sought to make sure these newly implemented technologies were interoperable. Since 2014, ONC has tracked progress toward widespread interoperability among hospitals and physicians by measuring their engagement in four domains of health information exchange: electronically finding, sending, receiving, and integrating patient health information. As shown in the figure below, US hospitals experienced widespread progress toward interoperability with 70% of hospitals reporting that they ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ engaged in all four domains in 2023,
Read Full Post.Digital Health Company Experiences Using EHR APIs
Wes Barker | February 15, 2024
New research from a survey of digital health companies shows that most companies (73%) use standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs) when integrating with electronic health records (EHRs) (Figure 1). In 2020, ONC finalized its Cures Act Final Rule, which codified the use of the Health Level 7® (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard for “certified APIs” that can enable secure, programmatic access to a patient’s electronic health information (EHI).
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