MMRGlobal, Inc. (fka MMRF)

[tbone1360]

Is Full Healthcare Data Interoperability A Pipe Dream?
Jul 11, 2014 06:08 pm

It’s always been very clear to me that healthcare interoperability is incredibly valuable. I still wish most organizations would just bite the bullet and make it a reality. Plus, I hope meaningful use stage 3 is blown up and would just work on interoperability. I think there are just so many potential benefits to healthcare in general for us not to do it.

However, I had a really interesting discussion with an EHR vendor today (Side Note: they questioned if interoperability was that valuable) and I asked him the question of whether full healthcare interoperability is even possible.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. As we discussed it more, it was clear that we could have full interoperability if the data was just exported to files (PDFs, images, etc), but that’s really just a glorified fax machine like we do today. Although it could potentially be a lot faster and better than fax. The problem is that the data is then stuck in these files and can’t be extracted into the receiving EHR vendor.

On the other end of the spectrum is full interoperability of every piece of EHR data being transferred to the receiving EHR. Is this even possible or is the data so complex that it’s never going to happen?

The closest we’ve come to this is probably prescriptions with something like SureScripts. You can pull down a patient’s prescription history and you can upload to it as well. A deeper dive into its challenges might be a great study to help us understand if full healthcare data interoeprability is possible. I’m sure many readers can share some insights.

I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts. Should we trim down our interoperability expectations to something more reasonable and achievable? We’ve started down that path with prescriptions and labs. Should we start with other areas like allergies, family history, diagnosis, etc as opposed to trying to do everything? My fear is that if our goal is full healthcare data interoperability, then we’re going to end up with no interoperability.

http://www.emrandehr.com/2014/07/11/is-full-healthcare-data-interoperability-a-pipe-dream/?utm_source=Healthcare+Scene&utm_campaign=ef3669784a-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4092230e89-ef3669784a-61022129