By Kathryn Ayers Wickenhauser, MBA, CHTS
Interoperability is a unicorn: many have heard about it, but no one has actually seen it.
D. Scott Jones and Dr. Richard Moses presented “The Top Ten Risks of Physician Compliance”, in which they highlighted the drastically changing healthcare industry. One of the major shifts we are seeing, they explained, is this idea of a move to interoperability, or the ability to freely communicate between providers and systems, to readily share and be capable of accessing information. However, they continued, interoperability is still an idea, not an institution. They likened interoperability to not only the unicorn, but also the Lochness Monster and the Bermuda Triangle. We hear about these ideas, but do they exist as we think that they do?
It’s true, interoperability has certainly become a catch phrase in the healthcare industry. As technology advances, our society, including the healthcare consumer, expects quick access to their health information. Interoperability is expected to foster communication between providers, allowing providers to make decisions with more information regarding the patient in mind. However, interoperability is NOT equal to being automatic, nor should it be. With everything so readily available through technology at our fingertips, we should not necessarily expect the same for our health information. After all, wouldn’t we would want our providers to carefully review our information and relay that information to us?
Healthcare is still, and will always be, about people. We cannot replace brain power with technology. As such, we should not use the term interoperability with the expectation that this denotes an automatic process without human assistance. As compliance professionals, we still need to invest in our people to review what and when health information goes our our proverbial door as we communicate with outsides entities. We will still need to develop policies, procedures, and training surrounding what information for outside providers we reconcile into our own Electronic Health Record and Designated Record Set.
While technology advances and we continue to see a shift in the healthcare industry towards interoperability, it is abundantly clear compliance issues will continue to develop as we one day might catch a glimpse of the unicorn. Even so, we will always need to rely on our greatest compliance asset, our people.