3 Misperceptions About Healthcare Interoperability

In early March, the ONC and CMS issued two final rules with the goal of giving patients unprecedented secure access to their health data and stopping the practice of information blocking. While achieving this won’t be easy, it may not be as difficult as some fear. Why? Because in many cases, the technical aspects of healthcare interoperability have been solved, and the market offers mature solutions to enable interoperability across many platforms, applications, devices, and networks. The challenge of sending and receiving information between disparate systems because of each product’s communication protocol idiosyncrasies is in large part a non-issue these days. The biggest interoperability barrier for most organizations is not a lack of solutions, but a lack of resources (time, money, and people) to help them get from their current circumstances to a place where information exchange is effortless.