Harvard Business Review October 14, 2019
Why can we run our entire financial lives with a few smartphone apps, a couple of plastic cards, and an ATM network, while so many of our interactions with the health care system still rely on phone calls, copiers, fax machines, and even the occasional multi-part form? Why is the routine exchange of health care information still so difficult compared with the routine exchange of financial information?
One reason is that banking has solved some foundational interoperability issues that health care still struggles with. As the longtime CIO at Partners HealthCare in Boston and, more recently, as part of my work at Cerner, a major vendor of electronic health records, I’ve watched this struggle up close for decades. The...