If you're not a health IT whiz, you may wonder why all sources of healthcare data are not already connected to one another and accessible to all. After all, the banking industry has connected sources of financial data so tightly that you can retrieve your money from a banking network pretty much anywhere in the world. What gives with healthcare data?
Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to universal healthcare data connectivity, despite the hard work institutions are doing to share such information, including the following:
1. Incompatible EMRs
Your hospital or medical practice may have a perfectly fine EMR in place,but regardless of how well it does its job, it probably can't connect with EMR run by the hospital across town. Healthcare techies do have compatibility standards to work with -- notably one known as HL7 -- but for reason too complicated to explain here, it doesn't do the job by itself. So in most cases, providers and healthcare institutions can't share data directly between EMRs.
2. Incompatible data
In theory, an EMR would be a receptacle for all clinical activity in a practice or hospital. But in reality, hospitals in particular have a huge number of back end systems to connect to their EMR (such as pharmacy systems and imaging) and many are still working on making this happen. At present, in other words, if a hospital wants to send imaging results to a doctor, they'll probably have to send them the old fashioned way (on sheets of film).
3. Slow development of health information exchanges
There are a large and growing number of health information exchanges (HIEs) emerging across the U.S., and there is some data sharing between HIE partners. But there's at least two flaws with the HIE models. First, participating in an HIE is completely voluntary, so regional HIEs may include some key players and not include other ones. The other issue is that even participants in the HIEs aren't sure the money they spend to get a trickle of information from the HIE is actually worth the money they spend to make it happen.
4. Need to enforce privacy rules: As most readers know, to share patient clinical data, healthcare institutions must have permission to share that data from that specific patient -- and the patient must specify who is allowed to see the data, as well as what portion of the data gets shared. Managing those patient consents electronically is a very large problem, one medical practices and hospitals/health systems are grappling with today.
Healthcare IT leaders are working hard to address these and other barriers to interoperability, but the reality is that it will be several years before we see serious progress in this arena. There are just too many problems to solve.
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