There is no doubt that the healthcare industry is going through a tremendous paradigm shift in an attempt to get a grasp on rising costs and inefficiencies. From ACOs, pay for performance, Meaningful Use, quality measures and patient access to electronic health records the fundamental enabler to deliver on this vision is an effective interoperability infrastructure.
One thing that is certain is the demand for sharing data across enterprises, partners, government agencies and patients will increase. Significant effort has been made in recent years by labs and pharmacies to integrate with EMRs ahead of meaningful use incentives and state health information exchange (HIE) implementations. Meaningful use, government regulation, reporting, the shift to outcome based payment, implementation of new EMRs, managing costs as well as mergers and acquisitions will place a much higher demand on IS departments to provide greater interoperability capabilities to both internal and external customers.
The Path to Success
Achieving success in realizing actionable informatics and making a significant difference in managing costs will in part be driven by the ability of an organization to implement a robust, agile interoperability infrastructure. When assessing all the aspects of implementing a comprehensive infrastructure it can be an overwhelming. While the destination should be well understood from the outset, the journey should be more forgiving providing for the necessary growth of the organization to evolve its understanding of the challenges of implementing enterprise interoperability solutions.
For organizations implementing enterprise level interoperability solutions it is beneficial to take the evolution versus revolution approach. From the outset, a clear long-term strategic direction should be understood and defined. The path towards achieving the strategic goal should be tracked closely allowing for necessary adjustments over time. While the strategic direction is significant, it is the short-term tactical projects that will provide value today by addressing current enterprise needs for providing services and system capabilities to internal and external users.
What is critical is that the strategic vision is defined and understood allowing for the alignment of the current work being done with the strategic goals of the organization. The key aspect is that tactical projects should plug into strategic direction wherever possible. Transforming an organization with siloes or a generally monolithic view of the world to a collaborative interoperable world requires the enablement of epiphanies within the organization. Long-term success is dependent on the ability of the organization to grow its expertise in the delivery and managing of actionable data that is meaningful to business managers and most importantly provides ROI to the business.
The Effect on Business
Typically within an IS department you have disciplines that understand their domain well but do not understand beyond their walls. Interoperability has a much more holistic view of the business. The term ‘business’ is specifically used here because business context is often at the core of the applications and services being delivered by the interoperability infrastructure. From an enterprise view, interoperability requires the understanding of business processes, the data elements required to communicate the attributes of the business processes and the source systems responsible for maintaining the business process data and states.
In subsequent articles, I will discuss the following topics with the goal of providing a roadmap for planning the implementation of an enterprise interoperability infrastructure:
- Planning and requirements
- Key components and capabilities
- Technical architecture
- Organizational capabilities
- Governance
What other topics would you like to see discussed?
