Providers “wonder how well prepared their vendor will be for the future”
From Healthcare IT News
October 8, 2014
EMR Vendors and Interoperability…It may not come as any surprise: Electronic health record vendors don’t play well with others. Do they need to? That remains to be seen. According to healthcare providers who say, in the lion’s share of cases, their EHR is not interoperable with others. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?
Some industry leaders have said that to move this interoperability needle in any meaningful way, particularly with getting vendors on board, it’s going to take action on the part of the federal government.
Just last month, CMIOs and CIOs held a press briefing on Capitol Hill to discuss what they’d like to see from the policy side.
“Where are the teeth with interoperability?” asked Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain Healthcare, at the press briefing Sept. 16. “With meaningful use, we had teeth. We had something we could get out there. We had benefits, incentives, and we had penalties.”
It’s important to keep in mind, he added, that the lack of progress on interoperability is not just due to the vendors. “These are really highly structured, difficult complex systems that were built, most of them, quite a long time ago, so it’s going to take some work for them to get to interoperability,” added Probst. “We haven’t provided them any guidance.” And that’s something that needs to change.
Probst, a member of the Health IT Policy Committee, has been one of the most outspoken voices on the topic of interoperability advancement. “It does all come down to these fundamental standards,” he added. “We’ve got to sit down and say,’what’s the standard, and how are we gonna move it?'”
HIMSS also has pressed HHS for big time changes with interoperability in recent weeks. Late last month HIMSS CEO H. Stephen Lieber and Paul Kleeberg, MD, board director chair, in a Sept. 30 letter to HHS recommended HHS consider additional incentives – both federal and private and policy levers to spur interoperability progress industrywide.