By Nahede Khosrovi
This post is the first of a two part series discussing the challenges faced by the healthcare industry in adopting IT interoperability.
IT interoperability is so routinely enjoyed by today’s consumer that its tardy appearance in healthcare could seem willful provocation. Our bank accounts can be accessed from the ATMs of financial institutions around the world, search engines quickly provide information on rival products to help with purchase decisions, and we converse with people near and far, unconcerned about their phone carriers.
At times, it seems nothing short of travesty that healthcare institutions continue to hand us long forms to complete by hand while they chase records through departmental mazes and transport them around a building.
Still, technology is by nature a rapidly evolving industry, while healthcare is a conservative one. Medicine operates within a massive infrastructure, answers to ever-increasing regulatory mandates, and asks physicians to train for 11-15 years, even without electing to subspecialize. Seen in this light, healthcare’s caution in adopting the lightweight, portable, and disposable tools and features by which IT quickly pivots and evolves – usually through products having a 2-year start-to-finish life cycle – seems less arcane.
Doctors are trained to make spot-on decisions with or without a ready patient record. Thus, electronic health record (EHRs) implementation and interoperability took a back seat to concerns about safety and privacy – as well as to the fact that even the newest doctors enter practice with more than a decade of training in other preferred tools and methods. Consequently, the health care industry endured a long period of IT limbo, trudging through ‘60s and ‘70’s era ‘clinical information systems’, the Institute of Medicine’s call for electronic standards, paralyzing system crashes, and concerns about “impaired patient care.”1, 2
Given these long-term challenges and complexities, it is more understandable why health systems do not resemble Silicon Valley startups in terms of technological innovation. However, as we will discuss in our next blog post, the healthcare tech tortoise is maybe moving faster than public opinion would suggest.
References
- Atherton J. Development of the Electronic Health Record. American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. (September, 2012) 13 (3): 186-189. Accessed at: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/2011/03/mhst1-1103.html
- Atherton J. Development of the Electronic Health Record. American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. (September, 2012) 13 (3): 186-189. Accessed at: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/2011/03/mhst1-1103.html
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