Interoperability: What Is It, How Can We Make It Work for Clinicians, and How Should We Measure It in the Future?
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Interoperability: What Is It, How Can We Make It Work for Clinicians, and How Should We Measure It in the Future?As the result of the federal incentive program, electronic health records have been widely adopted in the United States, with levels of adoption exceeding 90 percent in both the inpatient and outpatient settings (Henry et al. 2016).However, it is clear that health information exchange has lagged behind (Holmgren and Adler-Milstein 2017).Further, we have been disappointed to date in the lack of impact that this technology has had on health care delivery.Adoption of electronic health records did not consistently improve quality according to data gathered after Stage 1 of meaningful use (MU) (Kern et al. 2013;Samal et al. 2014).Transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2 of MU did not consistently produce the expected improvements in quality (Levine et al. 2017).There are many reasons that quality is not getting better so far with the new technology, but one is that health information exchange performance has lagged far behind performance on most other MU objectives (Holmgren and Adler-Milstein 2017).Interoperability has been defined by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering in the IEEE Standard Computer Dictionary as "the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged" (1991).That is different from health information exchange (HIE), which merely requires an ability to share information electronically.Notably, you can have HIE without true interoperability-the latter requires an ability to use shared data, and not just exchange information.Both adoption of EHRs-which implies electronic collection of information-and interoperability-suggesting you can move data around when
Source: Health Services Research
Authors: David W. Bates, Lipika Samal
Institutions: Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Health Information Management
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2793041177