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Technology Heals™

The High Cost of Health Data Access

Healthcare innovation is being strangled by expensive, complex data access policies. Startups with groundbreaking solutions are blocked by prohibitive API costs, convoluted approval processes, and opaque regulatory requirements. Our healthcare system desperately needs fresh technological approaches, but current policies create insurmountable barriers for emerging companies.

Healthcare technology is rapidly developing, startups and innovators face a critical challenge: exorbitant fees for accessing essential patient data. This issue is exemplified by Athena Health’s pricing model, which creates significant barriers to innovation and potentially puts patient lives at risk.

The Data Access Dilemma

 

Athena Health’s fee structure for data access is prohibitively expensive, especially for startups and practices serving Medicaid and Medicare patients:

  • For a practice with 95,000 patients, the monthly fee for monitoring high-risk patients (such as those with diabetes and missed appointments) amounts to $26,540
  • This cost covers 14,250,000 API calls per month, necessary for comprehensive patient care

Impact on Innovation and Patient Care

 

  1. Startups are forced to abandon potentially life-saving solutions due to data access costs
  2. Practices cannot afford to implement innovative tools that could prevent emergency room visits
  3. No reimbursement codes exist for these data access charges, making them unrecoverable

Competitive Disadvantage

 

  • EPIC and Cerner do not impose similar data access charges.
  • Athena Health offers its own solutions without data access fees, creating an unfair competitive landscape.

Call for Change

We urgently call on policymakers, healthcare regulators, and EHR vendors to:

  1. Implement affordable, tiered API pricing for startups and innovators
  2. Create reimbursement codes for data access charges related to preventive care
  3. Enforce fair competition practices in the EHR market
  4. Prioritize patient outcomes over profit margins in data access policies

The future of healthcare innovation and improved patient outcomes depends on breaking down these artificial barriers. It’s time to unlock health data for the greater good.