The
ability to communicate and adequately share patient information
through different IT channels has gained undeniable importance in the
current medical industry. Providing support in breaking
organizational barriers, interoperability can help in adding value to
healthcare. It can provide better outcomes for patients along with a
host of other benefits for healthcare providers.
With
serious untapped potential, interoperability is one of the most
underutilized concepts in the healthcare structure of the world.
Eliminating room for error and making healthcare dynamics more
dependable is what needs to be stressed on. With the healthcare
industry becoming more complex and diverse each day, there is a need
for an appropriate management system to simplify things for the
people involved. This includes everyone, right from the
lesser-educated patient who may be unfamiliar with medical
terminology to the doctor who struggles to find the time to look for
a patient’s previous records.
What Is Interoperability in Healthcare? The Relationship between Health Data and Health IT Interoperability
Interoperability
in healthcare is what a summary of a book is for a reader. It
compiles the entire information and presents it in a crisp,
simplified, and understandable way. Similarly, interoperability is
the process of gathering patient information from multiple databases
and presenting it to the healthcare provider. This makes it easier
for them to access the patient’s medical history and condition.
Health
information exchange needs to be seamless; it is divided into several
crucial steps like procuring, sending, receiving, and assimilating.
If any of these steps is not considered adequately or missed, the
healthcare provided to the patient, and the productivity of the
healthcare providers may get affected.
Surveys
reveal that transfer of information is more manageable than receiving
and integrating it. The sizes of healthcare-providing organizations
differ and so do their channels of data-based information. It means
that while information may be available on cloud storage, it may be
of little or no use to a rural healthcare provider because they won’t
be able to retrieve it promptly. This raises the need for uniformity
across all channels of healthcare database management through
different organizational sizes and types. Streamlining it might
enable a similar standard of healthcare in a rural clinic as a
cosmopolitan hospital.
