EHR Interoperability Thwarted By Lack Of Incentives

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

According to a Chilmark Research report, EHR interoperability will not improve until incentives and development processes change drastically.

EHR interoperability won’t improve without incentives and development processes changing drastically first. Chilmark Research’s latest study, 2015 Platforms in Healthcare: EHR Vendors’ Capabilities for Interoperability, explains that Electronic health record vendors are lagging in interoperability.

This isn’t entirely the vendors’ faults though, according to one expert. “The EHR vendors are bad,” Chilmark research analyst and lead report author Brian Murphy told MedCity News, “but they’re just doing what their customers want them to do.”

According to Murphy, “In some sense the providers are more culpable.”

The issue of interoperability is becoming more glaring due to a shift to value-based payment models which require more data sharing. iHealth Beat reports a hurdle to data sharing is the limited adoption of application programing interfaces. Researchers suggest that vendors should reconsider their value.

“Most of the major vendors regard their core clinical systems as comprehensive and inviolable — few readily admit that provider demands are broader than existing EHR feature sets,” write the study’s authors. “This stance glosses over the functional gaps, disorganized clutter, and general lack of usability in EHRs.”

“Vendors and their customers have had to employ a dizzying array of sanctioned and clandestine methods and technologies to extract data from EHRs,” the authors maintain, according to EHR Intelligence. “There are exceptions, but no major HIT vendor can support anything like the API infrastructure needed to cultivate the third-party application ecosystem that general-purpose B2B and B2C application vendors provide today.”