Despite the challenges, interoperability of patient health records and other healthcare IT remains worth fighting for — physicians, consultants and health IT vendors agreed at the emerge Americas 2015 conference in South Florida.
A major theme crossed multiple days of the meeting: the status quo is no longer acceptable.
Health systems and healthcare IT vendors that store essential patient information in disparate, proprietary systems need to change their ways. More open communication and secure sharing of patient care information could improve patient care and reduce the significant inefficiencies from duplicate tests and procedures, experts on multiple panels said.
Challenges & Solutions
“There are several reasons … [interoperability is not a reality today],” Dr. David Lubarsky, Chief Medical and System Integration Officer at the University of Miami Health System in South Florida said. “One, frankly, is a healthcare IT vendors have not seen fit to get together to develop a set of standards. [Also] the government has not intervened in a forceful manner as it has in European and Asian countries, where interoperability is much more advanced.”
“The way forward is unclear right now in the United States,” Dr. Lubarsky said, “but it’s ripe for a technological solution that would serve as an intermediary, if you will, to facilitate healthcare information exchange.”
Albert Santalo is Founder and Chairman of CareCloud.
As I said at the emerge Americas conference, “Healthcare is essentially a social business. Meaning you go to a doctor or health system and typically you bounce around from doctor to doctor. And these providers are in different businesses. You would think there’d be a technological underpinning that would meet those needs, right?”
“We don’t have the dial tone, the underlying layer,” said Anatoly Geyfman, CEO of the healthcare data analysis company Carevoyance. “That piece will allow us to capture the data at the point of care. It’s captured at single health system level now.”
“We’ve built very sophisticated silos,” Geyfman continued. “The next step is taking healthcare data from these Byzantine systems and making the information more accessible.”
Bart Vansevenant, Chief Marketing Officer at the software security firm Catbird, offered a solution. “There is a reason open source cloud is a good thing. I can summarize it in one word: interoperability. Otherwise, you have a vendor with their proprietary stack and another using their proprietary stack. We need to interoperate. “
You Can’t Spell Interoperability without IT
The current challenges to interoperability go beyond the more complex data requirements in healthcare versus other industries, as I explain in this 50-second video:
Do you know what you need when setting up a new medical practice?