6 Healthcare Interoperability Myths

With my new fascination with healthcare interoperability, I’m drawn to anything and everything which looks at the successes and challenges associated with it. So, it was no surprised that I was intrigued by this whitepaper that looks at the 6 Healthcare Interoperability Myths.

For those who don’t want to download the whitepaper for all the nitty gritty details, here are the 6 myths:

  1. One Size Fits All
  2. There Is One Standard to Live By
  3. I Can Only “Talk” to Providers on the Same EHR as Mine
  4. If I Give Up Control of My Data, I’ll Lose Patients
  5. Hospitals Lead in Interoperability
  6. Interoperability Doesn’t Really “Do” Anything. It’s Just a Fad like HMOs in the 90s

You can read the whole whitepaper if you want to read all the details about each myth.

The first two hit home to me and remind me of my post about achieving continuous healthcare interoperability. I really think that the idea of every health IT vendor “interpreting” the standard differently is an important concept that needs to be dealt with if we want to see healthcare interoperability happen.

Another concept I’ve been chewing on is whether everyone believes that healthcare interoperability is the right path forward. The above mentioned whitepaper starts off with a strong statement that, “It’s no tall tale. Yes. We need interoperability.” While this is something I believe strongly, I’m not sure that everyone in healthcare agrees.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do we all want healthcare interoperability or are there are a lot of people out there that aren’t sure if healthcare interoperability is the right way forward?

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.

3 Comments

  • Its just too early to be talking interop.
    Its like talking internet before computers. EHRs currently are inefficient and basically unusable. Though ONC touts huge numbers, most are just barely getting by on them. And the MU numbers are floundering. We really need first things first. We need EPs to feel safe, efficient, secure and happy about EHRs. To expect them to jump the shark to interop is too premature. Plus the standards are just not there yet. The cutesy artificial market created by HITECH, is about to implode. We need better software in our offices first. Once we are happy about that, we can think about interop. Right now we are completely overwhelmed with all the data entry requirements strapped to our daily being. Its like asking users of the Commodore 64 or Radio Shack TRS 80 if we want to get on a network and search the web. Its just not in our wheelhouse right now. Sounds great. But its a pipe dream at this point. We need to chop MU at its knees. We need to untangle certification of EHRs to allow creativity and customization. Once we are even marginally happy with EHRs we can move to interop. But at this point we have heard yearly, sometimes semi yearly speeches, roadmaps, puffery language, always guiding us in some crazy direction, CCD, or CCSA or FHIR or API or whatever. At some point the deaf ears at ONC and CMS will realize that they have basically overburdened the EP to the point of exhaustion. We’d rather take our penalties and just take care of patients, if needed , just cut back on Medicare patients we see. Thats the easier path at this point.

  • It shouldn’t be (outside of greed and fear) whether we want it, but rather can we safely get it. Patients need it – remember it’s all about them, not just our profits (or non-profit profit).

  • I go back to the basics on this topic. There have been “standards” in how medical data is to be stored for years. The problem is, those standards constantly change (some say progress), with little to no backward compatibility. Is a constantly changing standard actually a standard?

    How can anyone expect to use one of these standards, if they never stop changing?

    Anyone (ok, not anyone) could have looked at this from the outset and realized there were going to be issues. Why would any vendor use a standard data structure if it is not required? That just makes it easier for someone to switch vendors…which the vendors don’t want.

    When designing software, one of the earliest steps that must occur is the data structure architecture. That complete interoperability was not a requirement from the get to really doomed this.

    Can it be fixed? Sure, just like anything, throw enough money at it and it can be fixed. The real question is…should it be fixed?

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