Cambridge, MA – Vendors of healthcare IT clinical systems have been making slow and limited progress toward interoperability over the last 12 months. But that's a sea change in attitude from years past, when closed approaches dominated vendors' conventional wisdom.
While companies have announced some advances in sharing data, there's a long way to go before information can move freely between different data systems.
Vendors have a history of taking proprietary approaches that are closed and don't easily integrate, said Jeff Sutherland, chief technology officer for PatientKeeper Inc., a Boston-based vendor of mobile applications for physicians.
"Historically, it's been in vendors' interest to have closed systems, and many of them are still that way," Sutherland said.
While vendors' systems can share data through customized point-to-point interfaces and messaging standards from Health Level Seven, data exchanges typically require significant effort, Sutherland said.
Vendors are announcing product capabilities that enable data to be seamlessly imported into their products. For example, Misys Systems has announced Misys Connect, a Web-enabled approach that enables clinicians to access data on patients, no matter where that data resides. The product also will tie together, aggregate and normalize data to achieve interoperability, said Chris Callahan, a Misys executive.
Achieving extensive interoperability will require the industry first define what that entails, said Eric Brown, a vice president of Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research.
"It's difficult to nail down because the industry is still trying to define how medical records and clinical encounters are defined in the first place," Brown said. "The codification of encounter is relatively new in this industry."
Brown said he believes the industry needs to set an achieveable bar for interoperability and then improve it over time.
"That ease of interoperability is the most important thing," he said. "To have every scrap of information be available at every hospital is too a high bar. We don't need to over-engineer interoperability. We have to figure out how much is good enough and then make it easy enough to share data."
