Healthcare Interoperability Challenges
Interoperability is a complex process and is difficult to implement for multiple reasons, including:
Cost
Healthcare providers sometimes find it challenging to pay for creating suitable interfaces that are safe and secure to promote interoperability.
It can also be expensive to hire healthcare IT specialists on your own to manage your interoperability efforts. In such a scenario, it’s beneficial to partner with an established EHR software provider that has already invested time, resources, and expertise into developing solutions to promote interoperability. The provider should also continue improving their solution and provide ongoing updates to end users.
No way for agencies to measure the use of interoperability standards
The government has a vested interest in promoting and monitoring the use of and adherence to interoperability standards across the country.
You cannot measure how well interoperability efforts are progressing if you don’t have benchmarks to measure their achievements (or track entities’ failure to hit developmental milestones). Various stakeholders in healthcare and medical information technology have not been able to agree on what measurements to use as benchmarks, to date.
Patient identification
In a healthcare environment that more and more relies on electronic record software and other applications to store, manage, and transmit sensitive information, an obstacle to sharing patient data is a lack of standards to identify individuals. Ideally, each patient will have his or her own unique identifier(s).
What remains to be seen is what entity would administer such a system of uniform patient ID numbers, and what steps they would take to create and then adhere to a protocol to protect such confidential information.
Lack of standards for interoperability
There is a distinct lack of consistent interoperability standards to apply across the health information technology landscape.
To address this issue, healthcare organizations seek to promote standards for all medical practices, clinics, hospitals and other providers to get on board with standardization, so they can share data more readily between health information systems. Modern standards include Health Level 7 (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR).
Providers that resist sharing data
Some entities may be averse to sharing data, such as when a small urgent care clinic requests data from a nearby hospital’s EHR. Hospitals compete with clinics for patients, making them reluctant to share data with them. However, hospitals and other providers are legally required to share data when clinics or patients themselves request information.
Inconsistency in data exchanged between networks
Providers sharing inconsistent information over their networks is a significant problem. What’s more, data may be siloed, making it harder to know which server health IT professionals should use to locate information.
One potential solution to help boost interoperability is to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to process massive amounts of data formatted in multiple ways that are incompatible from one healthcare system to another.
For example, a system in Florida uses a different approach to generate lists of patient allergies compared to another system based in New York, making it difficult for the two providers to share patient data with one another over a network. Providers can find it challenging to exchange data about patients who live in New York but see a different provider while on vacation in Florida.
