Out of the FHIR Podcast
Today’s episode of Out of the FHIR brings a massive milestone: I’m thrilled to officially welcome my new co-host, Benji Graham, to the show. Benji is one of the few true, certified FHIR experts in the country, and he’s joining me to ensure we dive as deep into the technical weeds as humanly possible. To celebrate, we brought on a true legend in the health tech space: Dr. Don Rucker. Don has seen it all. He’s been an ER doc for decades, he helped build the first Windows-based EMR in the late 1980s, he served as the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) under the Cures Act, and he is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at 1Up Health. In this episode, Don pulls back the curtain on why healthcare IT is fundamentally different from the rest of the tech world, why the “patient identity problem” is mostly an illusion, and why RESTful JSON APIs are the ultimate forcing function that will inevitably change how care is delivered. Top Takeaways from Our Conversation * Healthcare settles for bad tech because consumers don’t control the money: In a functioning consumer-driven economy, interoperability is demanded by the buyer. In healthcare, the 1942 Stabilization Act shifted payment to employers, breaking the connection between user satisfaction and technology quality. * True interoperability requires a market forcing function, not just regulation: Radiology achieved seamless data exchange (DICOM) in the 90s because radiologists acted as true market-bearing consumers and refused to buy proprietary hardware. The rest of healthcare lacks this buyer pressure, leaving the government to act as a highly inefficient proxy. * The “Patient Identity Problem” is a myth for those with a right to data: The three core stakeholders under HIPAA Patients, Payers, and Providers already have perfect identity verification through the financial clearance loop. The identity matching crisis primarily exists for third-party scrapers and legacy networks trying to aggregate data without explicit consumer consent. * TEFCA is building a “network of networks” for a problem the internet already solved: True security and data exchange are achieved through point-to-point zero-trust networks and OAuth 2.0 consumer verification, not brokered document clearinghouses. 1. The Historical Accident of Healthcare Tech To understand why your cell phone works seamlessly in the mountains of Utah but your medical record can’t cross the street to a competing hospital, you have to look back to 1942. “We settle for stuff in healthcare because we have no control over it. In a functioning consumer-driven economy, interoperability is demanded and provided.” — Don Rucker During WWII, the Stabilization Act of 1942 inadvertently made employer-sponsored health insurance pre-tax to attract wartime labor. Because consumers stopped holding the purse strings, the industry stopped optimizing for consumer satisfaction. When computing arrived in medicine during the 70s and 80s, it didn’t start in the clinic—it started in the back office. The first EHR systems were optimized entirely for line-item billing, setting off a multi-decade game of “CPT code warfare” between payers and providers. Clinical utility was a distant afterthought. 2. DICOM vs. TEFCA: How Markets Drive Standards Why did radiology successfully digitize and standardize via DICOM in the 1990s while the rest of clinical data remains fractured? It came down to consumer leverage: * The Radiology Model: When CT and MRI scans started generating massive amounts of digital data, legacy device manufacturers (GE, Siemens, Philips) tried to lock radiologists into proprietary data silos. The radiologists—acting as a true market market-bearing buyers—collectively said, “If you don’t build open standards, we aren’t buying.” The vendors folded immediately. * The Modern EHR Model: Because patients and doctors aren’t the primary buyers of modern health systems, there is no organic market pressure to share data. In fact, large health networks have an economic incentive to prevent interoperability to keep patients locked inside their system. Because the market won’t enforce openness, the government had to step in with the 2020 Cures Act Interoperability Rule, mandating “APIs without special effort.” 3. The Perfect Triangle: Debunking the Patient Identity Myth Whenever tech professionals enter healthcare, they ask: Why don’t we have a National Patient Identifier? How do we solve patient matching? According to Don, the problem is entirely misunderstood. If you look at the fundamental transaction of healthcare, there is a perfect triangle of identity that requires zero matching algorithms: [ Payer ] / \ / \ / \ [ Provider ] ---- [ Patient ] * Provider to Patient: A clinic will not put a patient on the calendar without running a 270/271 eligibility check. They know exactly who you are before you sit in the waiting room. * Payer to Provider: Payers know exactly which clinicians they credential and clear checks for. * Payer to Patient: Payers know exactly who they insure to protect their own bottom line. The people who have a legal and moral right to the data under HIPAA have zero identity matching problems. The matching crisis belongs to third parties trying to route data across networks without the direct digital consent of the patient. 4. The Future is Restful JSON and AI Agents While legacy systems lean on brokered networks and document architectures (like C-CDAs), the future belongs to RESTful JSON APIs running on FHIR standards. The proliferation of consumer-facing AI agents is going to serve as the next massive forcing function. When patients realize an AI agent can hit a local provider’s API, pull down their complete medical history in seconds, and give them personalized preventive insights, they won’t accept legacy portals anymore. “Water flows downhill. RESTful APIs that are secure and direct operate at one-thousandth the cost of brokered networks. Digital health is going to allow true prevention, and consumer demand is going to force it out of the system.” — Don Rucker Out of the FHIR is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. FHIR IQ playbook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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