A word for the year

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine

Interoperability is the word for the week in some circles. It’s also the word of the year for the Office of the National Coordinator. In an interview with CMIO, ONC Chair David Blumenthal, MD, said an increased level of interoperability in the healthcare system is a major ONC goal for 2011.

It’s all part of health IT’s movement forward, he said. “We have been focused for the first year on getting physicians, hospitals, nurses and others to have operational EHRs. Now we’re going to have to move on to getting them to interoperate. Everyone knows that’s a vital capability. … [You] have to get information into digital form before you can move it, but then we have to make it possible to move it around the health system.”

Interoperability efforts will focus on “standards, initiatives, policies and procedures, governance of the Nationwide Health Information Network, new solutions for interoperability, better privacy and security policies—the whole suite of initiatives that are necessary to make interoperability work,” he said.

There’s plenty of work to do. Judging by recent nationwide surveys cited by CMS, about 80 percent of hospitals plan to apply for meaningful use funds and more than 40 percent of physicians intend to do so. However, a new report from KLAS, “Clinical Decision Support: Striving for More Intelligent Care,” shows many healthcare organizations are still working on getting their information into digital form, such as order sets, and are trying to get CDS tools to interoperate with their other systems.

“Integration is often more an ideal than a reality. In many CDS areas, providers have struggled to integrate third?party content into their EMRs. As a result, third?party content is often used simply as reference material for hospitals while they build CDS content themselves,” the KLAS report stated.

The lack of a push-button tool for bringing CDS information into EMRs means “integration is all over the map,” said Jason Hess, author of the KLAS report, “but providers still see the benefits.”

They may have to keep their eyes on the integration prize a little longer, but help is on the way, said Blumenthal. “Right now we’re focusing on creating pathways to move information. We expect that they won’t be technology-bound—once you get standardized information that is consumable electronically, then the pathways we’re creating should be available to all kinds of information,” he concluded.

Not a minute too soon.

Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO
mstevens@trimedmedia.com