Healthcare Interoperability: Barriers and Solutions

While the government’s push for Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) began in 2009 with the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the focus for health systems centered around EMR adoption rather than interoperability. Today, EMR adoption is widespread, with almost 98 percent of health systems using a government-certified EMR. But each of the hundreds of EMR systems in use today has its own set of technical specifications, clinical terminologies, and even unique customizations that prevent true interoperability and data sharing across systems.

The Real Barriers to Healthcare Interoperability

Today’s EMR systems, and the lack of interoperability between these systems, reveals that healthcare has fundamental problems to address to improve interoperability, including standardization of terminology and normalization of data to those standards. In addition, the volume of data healthcare IT systems are producing exacerbate these problems.