Dr. Robert Bart
In a recent survey issued by the Center for Connected Medicine that asked, “What is needed most to push interoperability forward in health care?” 53% of the 100 IT and business leader participants at hospitals and health systems answered “senior leadership commitment to interoperability as a top strategic priority.”
That interoperability continues to be an elusive target despite being a regulatory emphasis for more than a decade comes as no surprise.
“You have to put interoperability into the context of the challenges of being a leader in health care delivery organization or a hospital,” Robert Bart, MD, chief medical information officer of the Health Services Division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said in an interview. UPMC operates the Center for Connected Medicine in partnership with GE Healthcare and Nokia.
“For many health care delivery systems, the operational margin is extremely small,” he continued. “From a strategic perspective, they may be prioritizing things or opportunities that directly contribute to the bottom line and the financial success or even financial viability of the organization. “Interoperability certainly helps health care overall in the U.S., but whether it contributes directly to the financial bottom line of any given specific organization might vary significantly.”
But Dr. Bart said it really is not the financial incentives, a staple in the early days of the meaningful use program to spur adoption, that will get electronic health records and other health IT into a more interoperable space.
“I am not sure that financial incentives – unless they are significantly different in amounts than they currently are – are going to be the sole single reason why organizations prioritize interoperability higher,” he said.
Rather, he sees two key components that will drive interoperability.
First, he cited efforts by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to bring ownership of health data to the individual as an important driver.
“I think that is a better direction to push as opposed to financial incentives because I think that is really where we philosophically and then therefore operationally need to get to,” Dr. Bart said.
The second would take a lot more involvement from government that likely is more difficult to achieve: getting a more clear definition of health IT standards.
“We have accomplished some forward movement in interoperability, but we probably have far more road in front of us than we have left behind us as it relates to interoperability,” he said. “A fair amount of that is related to standards which, unfortunately, oftentimes are left up to interpretation. So when it comes to operationalizing these standards between different vendors or different health care systems, they sometimes don’t match up and add even more challenge to the exchange of information.”
And with industry not taking an active lead in solving some of the problems related to the standardization of data needed to drive interoperability, he suggested government should play a bigger role.
“I would like the government to take a stronger hand in helping health care define the standards so the standards are actually much more executable and there is a lot less interpretation, which I think would ease the ability for interoperability to flourish a lot more,” he said.
The move to value-based care could also provide added incentive to drive interoperability, Dr. Bart said.
Value-based care is “certainly not going to raise more barriers toward interoperability and potentially could lower some as organizations recognize that it may be a path to decreasing the costs of repeating tests that will not improve the quality of care delivered,” he said.
But overall, it would appear that getting to an interoperable point is going to be a challenge.
The report notes that “beyond tasks required by regulation or related to basic functioning (such as sharing data within their own system), interoperability still presents a challenge to organizations. Fewer than 4 in 10 report success with sharing data with other health systems, effectiveness in tapping into unstructured data, and effectiveness in reducing the cost of care.”
SOURCE: A report issued by the Center for Connected Medicine called “Improving Health Care Interoperability: Are We Making Progress?”