Dive Brief:
- Despite spending millions upon millions of dollars to connect information technology within healthcare organizations, many data silos remain, and the failure to connect them robs the data of its usefulness.
- One problem with connecting varied data sources -- particularly EMRs -- is that when they can't talk to other data sources, it brings their usefulness way down, draining value out of owning them.
- Glen Tobin, CEO of the Advisory Board Company's Crimson division, told Healthcare IT News that the key to success in establishing interoperability between health IT data sources will be affordability. “If you could drop the cost of interoperability by one order of magnitude, two orders of magnitude or three magnitudes,” Tobin continued, “so many more things would be possible because you would take the cost out of the system.”
Dive Insight:
Interoperability -- making IT devices "talk" to each other -- is arguably the biggest problem that healthcare IT departments face. As things stand, interoperability is such a difficult task that various hospitals or medical practices may have the same brand of EMR in place and still not be able to share data due to how the various installations are configured. And despite pressure from the federal government via the Meaningful Use program, full-throttle interoperability between key HIT devices is a ways away. It's a very difficult situation, and as Tobin notes, a serious missed opportunity.