A Case for Interoperability In Healthcare: Reduce Information Management Labor

By Konstantinos Klitsas, president, Talent Advisors, LLC

Today’s hospitals are filled with white-faced, exhausted, and worried men and women, which doesn’t inspire confidence for those who depend on them for care. Indeed, the workloads of nursing staff and physicians puts them at risk of becoming patients, rather than care providers, every day they set foot in the wards and consulting rooms. Severe staff shortages, budget cuts and a system stretched thin by efforts to reform, all take their toll on the population of medical professionals.

Apart from the risks to staff, patients and their loved ones have little choice but to trust in the abilities of fatigued practitioners. All too often though, that trust is shattered by medical errors that stall recovery from illness and injury and, in some cases, result in patient deaths. On reading this overview, you could be forgiven for thinking it refers to healthcare in a developing country of low socio-economic status. The truth makes for even more uncomfortable reading. The situation described actually refers to the current state of healthcare in the United States of America.

Machines Hold The Key To Recovery
How can interoperability (the open sharing of data between devices and information systems) resolve a state of affairs that relates to people who care for people? To answer that question, it’s necessary first to understand some of the factors which contribute to unacceptable medical staff workloads. These factors include:

• disproportionate amounts of time required for administration tasks
• the need to waste time accessing multiple systems to retrieve patient data
• extra work generated through clerical and medical errors
• inefficient workflows

Interoperability And Workload Reduction
The intention of EHRs as a mandated deployment in medical institutions is to give care providers detailed information about patients, consisting of data that follows patients’ progress through the healthcare system. However, without true interoperability to support that exchange of data, EHR is unable to serve the purpose for which it is designed. When hospitals and software vendors begin to properly collaborate and bring about some positive progress in interoperability, medical staff will begin to feel the benefits.

Interoperability will reduce cognitive workloads by delivering real-time data in a concise and context-sensitive manner. This alone will make life simpler for physicians and nurses alike. When interoperability is realized, physicians will be able to access data as they make their rounds. That data will be delivered in user-friendly formats on the screen of a tablet. Nurses will be able to spend more time caring for patients, instead of pulling charts and wasting time entering data into multiple files and systems.

Interoperability will also support diagnoses and reduce errors by alerting physicians to potential errors in drug administration. This in turn will further reduce workload by removing a deal of need for corrective work, generated currently by the proliferation of medical errors in America’s institutions.

All of these benefits are attainable. All of the errors made in hospitals are avoidable. All it takes is for the healthcare world to unite and bring true interoperability into being. After all, nobody benefits from a wealth of information, as long as it lays untouched in disparate files and databases. It’s time to set the data free and put it to use in saving lives and saving workloads.

About the author
Konstantinos Klitsas is instilled with the belief that technology can be leveraged to increase profitability, operational performance and clinical outcomes in the healthcare industry. He is the President of the Talent Advisors, LLC.