Interoperability Becoming Important To Consumers

The other day, I was talking with my mother about her recent primary care visit — and she was pretty po’d. “I can’t understand why my cardiologist didn’t just send the information to my family doctor,” she said. “Can’t they do that online these days? Why isn’t my doctor part of it?”

Now, to understand why this matters you need to know that my mother, who’s extremely bright, is nonetheless such a technophobe that she literally won’t touch my father’s desktop PC. She’s never opened a brower and has sent perhaps two or three e-mails in her life. She doesn’t even know how to use the text function on her basic “dumb” phone.

But she understands what interoperability is — even if the term would be foreign — and has little patience for care providers that don’t have it in place.

If this was just about my 74-year-old mom, who’s never really cared for technology generally, it would just be a blip. But research suggests that she’s far from alone.

In fact, a study recently released by the Society for Participatory Medicine and conducted by ORC International suggests that most U.S. residents are in my mother’s camp. Nearly 75% of Americans surveyed by SPM said that it was very important that critical health information be shared between hospitals, doctors and other providers.

What’s more, respondents expect these transfers to be free. Eighty seven percent were dead-set against any fees being charged to either providers or patients for health data transfers. That flies in the face of current business practices, in which doctors may pay between $5,000 to $50,000 to connect with laboratories, HIEs or government, sometimes also paying fees each time they send or receive data.

There’s many things to think about here, but a couple stand out in my mind.

For one thing, providers should definitely be on notice that consumers have lost patience with cumbersome paper record transfers in the digital era. If my mom is demanding frictionless data sharing, then I can only imagine what Millenials are thinking. Doctors and hospitals may actually gain a marketing advantage by advertising how connected they are!

One other important issue to consider is that interoperability, arguably a fevered dream for many providers today, may eventually become the standard of care. You don’t want to be the hospital that stands out as having set patients adrift without adequate data sharing, and I’d argue that the day is coming sooner rather than later when that will mean electronic data sharing.

Admittedly, some consumers may remain exercised only as long as health data sharing is discussed on Good Morning America. But others have got it in their head that they deserve to have their doctors on the same page, with no hassles, and I can’t say the blame them. As we all know, it’s about time.

   

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