A National Focus on Patient and Data Empowerment
The Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC) centered the agenda of its recent public meeting on a unifying theme: how data and health IT can transparently empower consumers and better support providers. PTAC’s role as an advisory body to HHS positions it uniquely to surface the structural challenges preventing patients from fully benefiting from digital tools, coordinated care, and modern information-sharing practices.
Across the meeting’s discussions, a consistent insight emerged: despite major advances in access and interoperability, patients cannot truly be empowered if the data beneath their experience remains fragmented, inconsistent, or difficult to interpret.
It Starts With Strengthening the Data Infrastructure
One session — Improving Data Infrastructure to Empower Patients and Providers — dug directly into this challenge. Onyx’s Chief Interoperability Officer, Mark Scrimshire, participated on this panel alongside leading voices from across the industry — Kristen Valdes (b.well), Hayes Abrams (Health Care Service Corporation), and Dr. Ami Parekh (Included Health) — to explore what it will take to create a data environment that genuinely supports patient understanding, engagement, and decision-making.
During the discussion, Mark contributed perspective on the evolution of interoperability itself. He offered a concise but substantive walkthrough of how the landscape has shifted over the last 15–16 years, tracing the path from early digitization efforts to today’s maturing ecosystem of FHIR-based APIs, payer data exchange models, and consumer-directed access frameworks. Drawing from his work co-chairing the Da Vinci Payer Data Exchange Workgroup and leading one of the first CMS APIs, he highlighted how policy, standards development, and real-world implementation have converged to form the foundation payers now rely on. Most importantly, he framed the industry’s next phase as moving “beyond killing the clipboard” — shifting from simply digitizing forms to building a consistent, trusted data layer that can genuinely empower patients and reduce the burden on providers.
Although each panelist approached the topic from a different vantage point — consumer health, payer operations, virtual care delivery, and technical implementation — their perspectives converged on the same conclusion: no patient-facing tool, care model, or digital workflow can succeed if the underlying data is not reliable, consistent, and capable of flowing across systems without friction.
Advancing a More Connected, Patient-Centered Future
Taken together, PTAC’s fall discussions point toward a shared trajectory emerging across the healthcare ecosystem. As payers, providers, innovators, and policymakers accelerate modernization efforts, the focus is shifting from merely enabling data exchange to ensuring that exchanged data is trusted, aligned, and actionable. Empowerment depends not only on access but on clarity — on giving patients and care teams information that reflects a complete and accurate picture.
The meeting reinforced a growing consensus: a stronger data foundation is essential to creating a healthcare system where patients can participate fully and confidently in their care. The work ahead will depend on continued collaboration across organizations that are building, governing, and operationalizing that foundation — a mission Onyx is proud to help advance.