Healthcare Interoperability in Action


100+ live clinical information systems sharing health data at HIMSS makes for a good headline. What’s not clear to me is how this is really any different than the past 2-3 interoperability showcases at HIMSS. Don’t get me wrong. I love that these systems can interoperate, but they’ve been able to interoperate for a long time. At least that’s what you believe from the headlines coming out of every interoperability showcase at HIMSS.

I’m hoping to learn at HIMSS why there’s such a wide gap between interoperability between systems at HIMSS and the real world. Is it a lack of desire on the part of healthcare organizations? Is it that the sandbox environment is much simpler than trying to share data between EHR systems which have had a series of customizations as part of every EHR implementation?

I also think there’s a major gap between hospital interoperability and ambulatory care. Most doctors I know aren’t working on interoperability at all. They wouldn’t even know where to start. They just assume that their EHR vendor is going to eventually solve that problem for them. Sure, they wish that it would happen, but I don’t think doctors feel like they have any power in making it a reality. I’d love to hear if you think that’s a good or bad assumption on the part of doctors.

Talking HIMSS interoperability showcase headlines, how much more powerful would it be to have the headline say “100s of live clinical information systems sharing data throughout the country.” 100s still feels weak, but at least we’d be talking about interoperability in a real life situation and not just the perfectly designed test systems.

I guess I’m still interested in “A little less healthcare interoperability talk…a lot more action.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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