The Future of EHR Interoperability

It is certainly not just in your health system but in almost all the renowned health systems that the emphasis on the term “healthcare interoperability” has kindled curiosity.

The attention toward Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) interoperability is growing in leaps and bounds, and interoperability is being prioritized across the world of healthcare. As per a recent report, the global healthcare interoperability market is estimated to reach USD 5.7 billion by 2026 from USD 2.9 billion in 2021, at a CAGR of 13.9%. Interoperability has become quite crucial in healthcare owing to its ability to increase transparency and accessibility and thereby improve the quality of care provided to patients.

In this article, you will discover:

• Why Is Healthcare Interoperability the Buzzword?
• The Current Challenges With Healthcare Interoperability
• How to Overcome the Challenges to Ensure Better Interoperability in the Future
• The EHR Trends That Aid the Growth of Interoperability

Why Is Healthcare Interoperability the Buzzword?

Healthcare interoperability has been discussed to a great extent recently, and knowing the significance of interoperability, most experts consider it to be more than just a buzzword. Interoperability is believed to be extremely important in healthcare for the following reasons:

Interoperability between EHRs ensures that healthcare providers have ready and easy access to comprehensive patient health data. This provides the complete big picture of an individual’s health status, thereby enabling life-saving healthcare decisions to be taken.

By sharing patient health information between key stakeholders, EHR interoperability can potentially reduce ambiguity and enhance workflow. This creates an environment that is strongly built on transparent communication and ultimately paves the way for better health outcomes.

EHR interoperability offers the option of large-scale data sharing, which can be extremely useful in the case of a global healthcare crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. It helps providers better understand public health problems and improve the efficiency of care.

Interoperability has become a key cornerstone in today’s healthcare. Its importance is appreciated to such an extent that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) launched an initiative called the Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030. The initiative focused on hearing out to the public about how they envision interoperability by the year 2030. The main idea behind the initiative is to come out with a long-term plan and strategies for interoperability. The launch of the initiative is by itself an indication of how interoperability is expected to grow in the time to come.

The Current Challenges With Healthcare Interoperability

The best way to determine the path for the future is to analyze and identify where we are falling behind at present. EHR interoperability is bound to do great things for healthcare but faces certain hurdles, such as the following, an indication of where it falls short:

• The difficulty in ensuring information consistency
  One of the major EHR interoperability concerns at the moment is the numerous sources of disparate data available, accompanied by data duplication in many cases. This causes a lot of hassle in patient care by making it difficult to access the right patient data at the moment of need. Data inconsistency can majorly arise because different providers may adopt health standards differently, and this creates difficulty in standardizing health information. There are also chances of missing health data, and this, again can lead to hindrances in patient care.
   
• The high costs involved in enabling interoperability
  While interoperability makes the exchange of health information easy and efficient, hiring resources to manage interoperability is not easy. It gets extremely expensive to hire the right qualified people to manage interoperability in your health system.
   
• The dilemma involved in validating access requests
  Transparent access and exchange, and the privacy of an individual’s health information are always at loggerheads. Complying with privacy standards and ensuring that the right information is shared without amounting to any kind of information blocking, is always a challenge. This difficulty is majorly caused by the issues with the proper comprehension of and adherence to the privacy policies set by the authorities.
   
• The roadblocks caused by legacy systems
  Another difficulty with interoperability is posed by legacy systems. Legacy systems may require major structural changes in order to mold the existing data to meet modern interoperability standards. As a result, the costs involved in accommodating data exchange with legacy systems tend to be very high. This adds to the other challenges of interoperability.

How to Overcome the Challenges to Ensure Better Interoperability in the Future

• To ensure improved interoperability in the future, it becomes extremely important to comply with the commonly set interoperability standards such as HL7 V2 and HL7 FHIR^®. HL7 V2 provides a language for communication among distinct systems, such as electronic medical record (EMR) systems, hospital information systems, radiology and picture archiving systems, laboratory information systems, billing systems, and more. FHIR^® has been developed to not just improve data consistency and modernize health data exchange but also streamline and make implementation faster than previous standards. It provides easily understood specifications that enable developers to capitalize on standard web technologies.
   
• To avoid the high costs of hiring an individual or team to manage interoperability in your health system, the best idea would be to employ specialized software that can automatically help improve EHR interoperability. An upfront cost invested in modernizing infrastructure would scale well and prove more cost-effective in the long run when compared to making payments to specialized individuals over the long term. Our very own FHIR-native data archival application helps with interoperability while facilitating data security and privacy.
   
• To facilitate smooth access and exchange of health information, it would be better to decommission legacy systems that no longer add any value to the health system but rather hinder the exchange of information. Decommissioning or sunsetting a legacy application could help with improving the accessibility of health information while reducing any kind of operational risks.

The EHR Trends That Aid the Growth of Interoperability

The following are some of the trends that are crucial and working on perfecting the path for interoperability:

• Transition towards cloud-based applications
  The implementation and adoption of EHRs is something that takes up a huge chunk of a health system’s budget. With cloud-based EHRs and other health and interoperability applications, the IT resources are procured on an on-demand basis, cutting down a major portion of the spending, which now becomes more of an operational expenditure than a capital investment. Moreover, cloud-based interoperability solutions enable all the key stakeholders to access health data through a secure single source which improves the speed of access and exchange of health information.
   

• Growing importance of health data standards
  The increased attention to health data standards can help health IT developers, EHR vendors, and health systems improve the health data exchange between health IT systems. Standards like C-CDA can be used to improve clinical decision-making, and FHIR^® with standardized APIs can help with delivering health data directly into the provider workflow. When various health systems start adopting these commonly set standards, it brings about uniformity in the process and ensures smoother data exchange.
   
• Increase in focus on APIs
  One of the major reasons for the focus on APIs is their ability to paint a big picture of healthcare by facilitating the streamlining of data exchange and expanding data liquidity. APIs also enable the connection between devices like smartwatches and patient portals. This ensures that the providers are updated continuously with up-to-the-minute patient health information, ultimately allowing them to provide better patient care.
   
• Emergence of IoT, AI, and other digital technologies
  Modern technology like AI and IoT have their fair share of contributions to the growth of interoperability. For instance, COVID-19 has brought to the fore the importance of remote patient monitoring and the technology that enables it. When AI and IoT are combined together, they can improve healthcare interoperability by making sense of large volumes of data in a reduced time; this can help improve clinical workflow and enable clinicians to focus on improved patient care.
   
• Adoption of the blockchain system
  A blockchain system helps interoperability by integrating scattered health information. It offers a decentralized database of transactions in the form of blocks arranged in a chain that is synchronized through the internet to enable data sharing. Blockchains also ensure data integrity through data sharing, data replication, and eliminating a single node of control. With blockchain, data privacy is also ensured as it eliminates unintended data sharing through its digital ledger technology.