The “Talk to Each Other” Challenge for Healthcare
There is an excellent read in the Wall Street Journal today from Susan DeVore, the President and CEO of the Premier, Inc. alliance of 3,000 community hospitals throughout the country. (Ms. DeVore is also chairman of the Healthcare Leadership Council.)
In her WSJ piece, Ms. DeVore notes that, while other industries have made excellent use of evolving information technologies to improve customer service and strengthen cost-efficiency, healthcare has lagged behind. Improved data sharing is essential, she writes, “to ensure the right information about the right patient is available at the right time.” She is absolutely correct in her assertion that making this happen is a responsibility shared by the private sector and public officials.
The DeVore column is below:
SUSAN DEVORE: Imagine what Twitter would be like if you were only able to have and Tweet to one follower? Or if email only worked within the four walls of your organization? Technology has made information sharing seamless and almost limitless for most people and industries. But it hasn’t reached its full potential in health care.
In health care, technology is foundational to drive change and improve the quality and value of patient care. The problem is that important health-care data cannot flow freely among the various health-information-technology systems that hospitals and health systems use. This hinders the ability for providers to connect and easily exchange information across their organizations and with other health systems.
As health systems focus on accountable care and increasingly move toward alternative payment models, the need for interoperable data across all health-information technology systems becomes critical. The ability to seamlessly pull discrete data anytime, anywhere helps to ensure the right information about the right patient is available at the right time. But today, providers are challenged with having to double check data pulled from disparate devices to make sure the information matches, such as dosing and blood sugar levels. Not only is this a step back for efficiency, but it is another manual process that has the potential to create errors and patient-safety issues.
To truly leverage health-information technology’s full potential, diverse networks and systems in health care must be able to talk to each other. To do so, we should require the use of innovative technology solutions such as open application programming interfaces (APIs) and secure third-party applications that connect the data to enable the real-time exchange of information.
Designing and implementing health-information technology that promotes collaboration among all stakeholders would create a learning health system that focuses on improving health-care quality, efficiency, safety, affordability and access. Private-public partnerships on interoperability governance, standards, measures and system transparency are essential to make this work.
A few weeks ago I was watching as my grandchildren were playing with their parents’ smartphones. At their ages, they are only interested in the bells and whistles, but in their little hands were devices probably considered impossible 10 or 15 years ago. Through innovation, ingenuity and necessity, my hope is that the challenge of interoperability becomes an obsolete concern.
