Question

What are the primary challenges for interoperability? Discuss an organization that is working to promote interoperability within the clinical environment. Describe one of their initiatives, its benefits and challenge, and its impact on the delivery of care.

Answer 1

• Lack of Consistency When Identifying Patients: Currently, there is no consistent way of identifying a patient across the healthcare spectrum, throughout large healthcare systems or even across a network of providers. Patients are identified by their name, date of birth, Social Security number, most commonly. The problem is that each instance of this information is stored in different ways in different systems meaning patient identification errors are possible.

• Lack of Standards for Sending, Receiving and Managing Information Between Health Systems: Currently, the healthcare technology offered by today’s vendors makes it difficult to simply copy or share information from one electronic health record software or other healthcare technology to another. Mismatched fonts, external data fields, and proprietary formats mean that data has to be manipulated and sanitized before it can be imported into another system.

• The Difficulty with Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement of Interoperability Between Healthcare Systems: As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Therefore, it’s difficult to quantify costs, error rate and other issues that are created when healthcare systems do not speak to each other in meaningful ways. Without the ability to measure, or track outcomes, health systems and other healthcare organizations can’t improve its most important processes and no true interoperability can be achieved.

• technical challenges : "These limit interoperability through — for example — a lack of standards development, data quality, and patient and healthcare provider data matching."

• Administrative challenges : Federal documentation and administrative requirements (including billing requirements) contribute to health IT burden due to outdated guidelines for evaluation and management codes that unnecessarily link payment to documentation."

benefits :

• improves patient experience: If your physician were to send you for an MRI scan, the radiographers or radiologists would be able to share your reports almost immediately even if they don’t use the same software internally. This sort of uniformity in transmission and reception of information can be of vital importance in the course of healthcare provided to a patient.
• Simplify health records: When a healthcare provider treats a patient well, they will recommend them to others, and client testimonials are of great importance in healthcare. When there is better patient engagement, more time can be given to the actual process of planning a course of action for their health instead of repeatedly running the same tests and waiting for the patients to find their previous prescriptions.

Organisation:

1. Foundational interoperability allows one IT system to receive a data exchange from another and does not require the receiving information technology system to interpret the data.

2. Structural interoperability defines the structure or format of the data exchange (i.e., the message format standards) where there is uniform movement of healthcare data from one system to another. Structural interoperability ensures that data exchanges between information technology systems can be interpreted at the data field level.

3. Semantic interoperability is the highest level, where two or more systems or elements can exchange and use information. Semantic interoperability takes advantage of both the data exchange structure and the codification of the data. This level of interoperability supports the electronic exchange of patient summary information among caregivers and other authorized parties via potentially disconnected electronic health record (EHR) systems and other systems to improve quality, safety, efficiency and efficacy of healthcare delivery.

impact :

• Stronger privacy and security for patients
• Greater patient safety
• Improved patient care
• Reduced healthcare costs
• Accurate data