Epic, Cerner and others reveal just how their EHRs are interoperable

Many electronic health record vendors claim their technologies are interoperable with other healthcare information systems. And these claims can be true – or true to a point. Healthcare IT News interviewed key interoperability executives with four high-profile EHR vendors – Cerner, DrChrono, eClinicalWorks and Epic Systems – to discuss how their systems are interoperable as well as health IT interoperability overall. The first basic type of interoperability is health system to health system, to coordinate care for a patient across organizations, said Dave Fuhrmann, vice president of interoperability at Epic Systems. He explained that Epic supports this in four ways: Shared Instance - Community Connect: An organization using Epic can share its instance with other providers in the community. The patient's record is on one shared database.