The future of health information technology in a Trump presidency

Under Trump’s Administration, no other sector will undergo as many fundamental changes as healthcare. President-elect Trump’s healthcare policies have been particularly vague; although he is intent on repealing Affordable Care Act, we are not certain about his solutions for replacing it, other than the proposal to allow health insurers to compete in multiple states.

While the exact outcomes of such proposal remain to be carefully analyzed, the idea behind it – fostering competition and relying on the invisible hand of the free market – may be a sound solution to our nation’s health information technology challenges. Over the past decade, despite spending billions of dollars, government interference in the health IT market has only resulted in small victories and big failures. In the following, I lay out a set of recommendations for fostering interoperability and protecting patient privacy as the two most important challenges in the health IT domain over the next four years.