Reasonable and Unreasonable Healthcare Interoperability Expectations

Other than EMR and EHR, I don’t think there’s any topic I’ve written about more than healthcare interoperability. It’s a challenging topic with a lot of nuances. Plus, it’s a subject which would benefit greatly if we could make it a reality. However, after all these years I’m coming to some simple conclusions that I think often get lost in most discussions. Especially those in the healthcare IT media.

First, we all know that it would be wonderful for all of your healthcare records to be available to anyone who needs them at any time and in any place and not available to those who shouldn’t have access to them. I believe that in the next 15 years, that’s not going to happen. Sure, it would be great if it did (we all see that), but I don’t see it happening.

The reasons why are simple. Our healthcare system doesn’t want it to happen and there aren’t enough benefits to the system to make it happen.

Does that mean we should give up on interoperability? Definitely not!

Just because we can’t have perfect healthcare interoperability doesn’t mean we shouldn’t create meaningful interoperability (Yes, I did use the word meaningful just to annoy you).

I think one of the major failures of most interoperability efforts is that they’re too ambitious. They try to do everything and since that’s not achievable, they end up doing nothing. There are plenty of reasonable interoperability efforts that make a big difference in healthcare. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of better. That’s been exactly what’s happened with most of healthcare interoperability.

At the HIMSS conference next month, they’re going to once again have an intereroperability showcase full of vendors that can share data. If HIMSS were smart, they’d do away with the showcase and instead only allow those vendors to show dashboards of the amount of data that’s actually being transferred between organizations in real time. We’d learn a lot more from seeing interoperability that’s really happening as opposed to seeing interoperability that could happen but doesn’t because organizations don’t want that type of interoperability to happen.

Interoperability is a challenging topic, but we make it harder than it needs to be because we want to share everything with everyone. I’m looking for companies that are focused on slices of interoperability that practically solve a problem. If you have some of these, let us know about them in the comments.

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.

2 Comments

  • Agreed John. Both the health care and technology providers are not thoroughly committed to interoperability that would give their competitors the upper hand.
    There is a path to interoperability that is practical and it is includes being able to use any of the exchange methods and networks fluidly without making the end user understand the difference between the technologies, just let them exchange information.

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