Healthcare Data Access and Portability (HDAP)
Healthcare data access barriers cost hospitals millions while complicating patient care and long-term accountability. Smarter portability standards and clearer protections can strengthen healthcare systems nationwide.
The Problem
Hospitals are legally required to retain patient data for years after care is delivered. But much of that data remains trapped inside outdated legacy systems that have already been replaced operationally.
Because access to these systems is often controlled by vendors with proprietary technology, hospitals can face ongoing and largely unregulated costs simply to maintain access to their own historical patient records.
Across the healthcare industry, those costs total millions of dollars annually.
The Impact
Healthcare organizations become trapped in expensive maintenance cycles — spending significant resources preserving outdated infrastructure instead of investing in modernization, patient care, cybersecurity, interoperability, and future systems.
The Solution
A modern healthcare data portability framework could:
prohibit excessive legacy data access fees,
establish reasonable portability standards for historical patient data,
define exploitative legacy access practices as a form of information blocking,
and support a more interoperable and resilient healthcare data ecosystem.
Why Now?
Federal healthcare policy is increasingly focused on interoperability, transparency, and enforcement of information blocking rules. At the same time, hospitals across the country continue paying enormous sums simply to access and preserve data they are already legally responsible for maintaining.