What You Ought to Know:
– EHR interoperability holds immense potential to enhance affected person care choices, allow innovation, and cut back administrative churn. Nevertheless, a brand new report from KLAS Healthcare IT Insights reveals that regardless of developments in data-sharing know-how, interoperability continues to be removed from reaching its desired state.
– The report emphasizes that true interoperability is a workforce effort requiring healthcare organizations, payer organizations, and distributors to work collectively to completely notice desired outcomes. KLAS offers an summary of three key EHR interoperability use instances and the challenges hindering knowledge sharing.
Supplier-to-Supplier Affected person Report Sharing
EHR distributors have made substantial progress of their capabilities for sharing affected person information, primarily by way of particular person connections, workflow enhancements, and enormous nationwide networks like CommonWell and Carequality. This has made affected person knowledge extra out there than ever.
The Usability Hole
Regardless of the rise in knowledge availability, KLAS knowledge from the Arch Collaborative reveals that clinician satisfaction with exterior integration has not considerably improved over time. The core difficulty is the poor usability of shared information.
- Obstacles to Actionable Information: Points like duplicative knowledge, various knowledge codecs, and poor knowledge mapping forestall clinicians from making the “deluge of information” actionable inside the EHR.
- Stagnant Satisfaction: In 2024, solely 49% of end-user clinicians agreed that their EHR offers anticipated integration with outdoors organizations, a determine that has hovered close to 45% since 2018.
Third-Social gathering Software Information Sharing
Distributors regularly use the variety of proprietary APIs (Software Programming Interfaces) they’ve out there as a measure of their interoperability capabilities. Whereas elevated API availability appears interesting, KLAS efficiency knowledge reveals a disconnect:
- API Rely vs. Satisfaction: Elevated availability of APIs doesn’t correlate with excessive buyer satisfaction concerning a vendor’s means to assist integration objectives.
- The Downside of Worth: “Having extra APIs doesn’t equal receiving extra knowledge and worth”. Distributors could construct totally different sorts of APIs (single multifaceted vs. a number of specialised) to attain the identical aim.
- FHIR Limitations: Whereas many distributors report supporting FHIR R4 and USCDI knowledge courses, they nonetheless have work to do to make sure FHIR APIs present the breadth of information that healthcare organizations really require.
In KLAS efficiency knowledge, Epic leads the acute and ambulatory EHR choices with a median rating of 8.0 for supporting integration objectives, adopted by athenahealth at 7.7.
Payer-to-Supplier Affected person Report Sharing
Information sharing between payer and healthcare organizations stays a long-standing problem, primarily attributable to a scarcity of belief.
- The Belief Deficit: Payers concern fraudulent claims, whereas healthcare organizations concern giving up an excessive amount of affected person knowledge. This lack of belief contributes to pointless administrative churn and prices.
- Regulatory Drivers: Latest federal rules and CMS mandates (e.g., CMS-0057-F) are spurring organizations to enhance data-sharing through bulk FHIR APIs.
- Collaboration is Key: KLAS’s evaluation of “Factors of Mild” case research discovered that almost all talked about the significance of constructing belief and partnering (96% of case research). In distinction, solely about half talked about the necessity for robust know-how (48% of case research).
The report concludes that whereas know-how is important, robust know-how alone is not going to assure success; stakeholders should foster clear collaboration and align objectives to attain a scalable affect on knowledge sharing.
