Health IT Agency Mulls Sharing Patient Data With Social Services

Federal regulators are taking aim at the information walls between health-care providers and the social services sector as part of their effort to reduce health disparities, Micky Tripathi, the nation’s top Health IT official, said Thursday.

Linking health care providers with social services organizations through health information technology will allow patients to receive more holistic care and enable better interventions to address social problems that can lead to poor health outcomes, said Tripathi, head of the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, or ONC. It’s housed in the Department of Health and Human Services.

These efforts arise from ...