Patients may be seen by various doctors and clinicians during treatment, such as a primary care physician who diagnoses diabetes and monitors overall health, an endocrinologist who adjusts medications and monitors blood sugar, and a dietitian who assists with nutrition. If these professionals can’t work together and share information, it creates a disconnect that impacts the quality of care delivery.
Interoperability is the missing piece to ensuring teams understand patients and their needs and keep data flowing between the systems clinicians use. But it takes a concerted effort to make technology work together. Let’s look at where hospital IT often falls short on interoperability and how chief information officers (CIOs) can solve challenges to support staff and care delivery.
Creating an Interoperable Healthcare System
Today’s clinicians and providers often work with isolated documents rather than a complete, unified patient record. We see this play out when a doctor reviews a single document, sees a medication that another specialist prescribed, and changes it without knowing the full context.
But this puts patients at risk. This kind of fragmented data creates a cycle of miscommunication and potential errors, such as medication interactions or allergic responses.
Realizing the Vision of a Unified Care Team
To provide the best patient care and ensure positive outcomes, all care providers—primary care, specialists, and hospital staff—must work together and have visibility into one accessible system. This means maintaining a holistic patient record to reduce the risk of conflicting treatment plans and support informed clinical decisions.
Initiatives for Interoperability
Care teams must cross boundaries between inpatient and outpatient settings and share data to drive down healthcare costs. Notably, the Office of the National Coordinator is pursuing initiatives such as the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) and Clinical Document Architecture (HL7 CDA) to open up visibility.
Benefiting from Codified Data
Before modifying a patient’s care plan, providers need to be on the same page. But codification—or ensuring data is structured in a way where data fields are standardized and comparable—is one of the most common barriers.
USCDI and HL7 CDA reduce the need for custom translations and enforce uniform data standards. Together, they define the minimum data set required for interoperability and enable plug-and-play integration so you can share information, including diagnoses, lab values, medication codes, and more, in a uniform format.
The harsh reality is that clinicians often only have a few minutes to spend with patients. CIOs and clinical teams need to codify data as it’s generated to ensure structured, discrete data sets. Being able to reference digestible data within documentation simplifies clinical decision-making and collaboration and ensures care continuity.
Fragmented Data Sharing Harms Healthcare Delivery
CIOs have countless balls in the air between balancing futureproofing systems, managing cybersecurity, and ensuring revenue growth. But interoperability also has to be a top priority because, without it, you could face rising costs from inefficiencies or adverse events during the course of care.
Safety and Legal Risks
What would happen if clinicians operated in a vacuum? Disorganization and error.
Consider what would happen if a nephrologist changed a patient’s medication without knowing what another doctor had prescribed. Not only could this scenario cause a negative outcome, but it could also lead to malpractice issues.
Historically, health information exchanges struggled to coordinate, leading to fragmented data-sharing practices, poor patient matching, and incorrect data being used. Fragmented data only gives clinicians and providers part of the patient history puzzle, so if mistakes happen, lawyers can potentially target everyone on the care team.
Improving Data Organization
Hospitals need policies to validate that data is matched to the right patient. The trouble is that managing records across providers often requires manual review. You need a system of structured governance to create checks and balances, complete with matching protocols and unique identifiers, to ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance.
EHRs Solve the Interoperability Gap for CIOs and for Healthcare
Interoperability in today’s systems is possible, but it isn’t always in place because of the effort it takes to deliver data in a way providers can quickly and easily use. However, a modern electronic health record (EHR) system can close the interoperability gap. Everyone—from CIOs to care teams—can import and export codified data effectively across disparate systems to stay in lockstep with one another and keep up with legislative changes.
Benefits Across Healthcare
Never underestimate the value of clear information. A modern EHR gives healthcare organizations and their teams a unified view of patient data across providers and clinicians.
Get a clear picture of what’s really going on. Consolidate verified patient data from a unified care team to improve patient safety and integrate it into clinical decision support tools. An EHR should ensure data integrity and interoperability, facilitating seamless integration with APIs that reduce the need for custom interfaces.
Improved data matching can even reduce manual workloads. Ease the burden on IT and clinical teams with readily accessible patient information and mitigate burnout.
Next Steps for CIOs
Are your systems lagging and putting operations and care delivery at risk? Adjusting your approach to healthcare technology can close the interoperability gap. Use these tips as a baseline to streamline sharing across your organization and improve the continuum of care.
About Lee Miller
Mr. Miller, Deputy Chief Architect at Juno Health, has over 40 years of technical leadership in a wide variety of industries, with the last 20 years in healthcare. His knowledge bridges advanced technical research, the current federal healthcare regulatory environment, and practical healthcare interoperability solutions, positioning him at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and regulatory frameworks. Currently, he is completing a PhD in Electrical Engineering.
