H&HN April 14, 2015
Ensuring that disparate health systems can easily share data is crucial for patient safety and lower costs.
Every few years, health care, like any other industry undergoing rapid changes, adopts a rallying cry. For some time now, it’s been interoperability. The clamor is reaching a fever pitch, and with good reason. Our collective efforts to significantly improve health and health care through electronic health records, population health management and even the “empowered patient,” will be largely unfulfilled without interoperability.
For health care to have a shared view on interoperability, and a shared commitment to it, industry leaders need a common definition. We’ll use the elegant and simple definition used by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information and...