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Topic Summary for Interoperability (Week 4 DB)

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Why is Interoperability Important to Nursing? 

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Why is Interoperability Important to Nursing? 

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Estimated read time: 5 minutes

When a patient arrives at a health care organization, they are greeted by a nurse who asks a series of questions and collects a number of documents as part of the admission process. While providing this information is crucial for receiving quality care, chances are the patient has been through this process already at least once during a previous care encounter.

This is just one example of where interoperability, the capacity of different information systems, devices or applications to access and exchange data within and across organizational boundaries, could play a role in eliminating the redundant, time-consuming and potentially life-threatening aspects of health care.

In this Q&A, Becky Fox, chief nursing informatics officer at Atrium Health, discusses why interoperability is key to decreasing documentation burden, clinician and provider burnout, and improving the overall health care experience.

The importance of interoperability for nurses and patients
Why is interoperability important to nursing staff, and how does it impact their day-to-day work?
Fox: We want to leverage all the data we have about patients to drive the best treatment and outcomes possible. Through mining the data with analytics, we can make the data more meaningful to clinicians, so they can focus on patient care rather than having to pull information together. In the health care industry, we are at a great place right now, where we can gather information from multiple sources, quickly synthesize to get to understanding and make data actionable.

Let me share an example. When a patient comes into a health care organization or an ambulatory setting, the nurse goes through a series of questions during the visit or admission process to gather information about the patient. Wouldn't it be great if the nurse already had detailed information from all the patient's previous health experiences and didn't have to go through the exercise of asking a lot of repetitive questions? Not only data from prior visits or encounters, but also information about the patient themselves and their own health management-from wearables, to health apps, and of course, demographic and social information. It would be great if all of that information could be taken in, digested, and presented to help the clinicians focus their questions and assessments. The end result would be quicker and better care.

That is what interoperability is all about: bringing multiple sources of information together and using health care technology, innovations and analytics to apply it more meaningfully to the care we provide to patients. It's also about being able to use the data to engage patients and consumers in changing behaviors in a positive way along their health care journey. Interoperability, coupled with usability, can help remove noise and mundane tasks from the workflow. It's an opportunity to collectively leverage information that has already been collected and contribute to the bigger picture of decreasing the burden of documentation, clinician burnout and improving the patient/consumer experience.
How does interoperability impact patient care?
There are still gaps that happen in health care. For example, when a patient goes into a care setting and fills out a series of questions, screening tools and has discussions with care providers, and then they go to a different health care setting, and they have to do it all again. Anytime you are repeating processes, things can be overlooked, missed or not understood. It's also annoying to the patient! They can end up with redundant testing, procedures and assessments, and all these examples have a financial cost to the patient, the institution and payors. There is also the cost of time and potential delay in care and decision-making when, for instance, a lab test has to be repeated.

We, as health care leaders, all collectively must address this by working to improve interoperability, the usability of data and how to better share all data across all systems in meaningful ways.

Overcoming roadblocks to health care interoperability
What are the biggest challenges that nurses face with regards to data access and exchange across systems?
While health care systems collect and document similar information about patients, it is not standardized. If all health care systems, regardless of their EHR vendor, collected and documented the same data, sharing information across hospitals and health systems would be significantly easier. There are some industry leaders working together to establish standards of such, and I think in the near future, you are going to see movement in this direction.

We are also at a place in the health IT journey in which technology and analytics are really making great strides, with even bigger strides to come. We realize we must collect data from multiple places, but we need data normalization to occur in the process, so that we are all speaking a common language. The implementation of standards that we can all agree upon is also extremely important.

The other thing that is shifting is our mindset in how we view and share our data.As we move in the direction of managing the health of large populations and look at data from more outside entities, we will need to be more accepting of data which may have errors in it.We can't be purists. We must look at data in terms of themes, directions and aggregation. We know there are going to be lessons learned. And, we can't let perfect get in the way of progress. We have to participate in this transformation and not be afraid of moving forward. As an industry we all need to work together to make sure we are sharing, streamlining and consolidating data. That is what will contribute to changing health care in the U.S. and around the world.
What are your recommendations to other health care systems on how to support their nurses through advancing interoperability?
At Atrium Health, we have a significant focus on our population health strategy. Looking at sources of data across different systems is another step in the journey of pulling information together and providing the best health care for our patients. If a health care system isn't yet on a population health journey and isn't sharing information with other health systems, then this would be a good place to start. We're all in this together, and our patients are going to expect that their health information is being shared, reviewed, analyzed and leveraged to give them the best care possible.

Health systems need to make sure they are participating in all avenues of interoperability and implementing standard tools, work and documentation. Nursing leaders must participate in the conversations of how-to bring interoperability to the beside and to ambulatory clinicians, so they can be their best for their patients.

Interoperability is not just for physicians, it's for all clinicians, and nursing needs to be at the table to make sure that all of the right data sources are being brought to the forefront in meaningful ways.
At Cerner, we're doing our part to innovate and transform health information technology for nurses. Learn more here.

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Why Interoperability Progress is Significant for Nursing

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Estimated read time: 5 minutes When a patient arrives at a health care organization, they are greeted by a nurse who asks a series of questions and collects a number of documents as part of the admission process.

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Read through the questions and answer one of the three that best fits your current role.
1)Describe how interoperability can be improved at your organization in your current role?
2) In what ways has interoperability at your institution been beneficial to your position as a nurse?
3)How can interoperability improve patient care at your facility?

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How interoperability & data sharing can improve patient safety

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Is your data "Useful, Safe and Satisfying"?

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Is your data "Useful, Safe and Satisfying"?

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Informatics 101: What is Interoperability

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Participation is important for interoperability success.

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MEDHOST's Director of Interoperability gives a quick breakdown on one of the most critical challenges facing the healthcare IT sector, especially EHR providers. In this video, Laskaris talks about what interoperability is, how it has evolved, what it will take to achieve, and why full-on participation is important for its success.

We believe nationwide interoperability is essential for ensuring a bright future for healthcare. If healthcare is a journey, interoperability is the key that works to minimize wrong turns in a patient's care. In the most basic sense, the idea is to make it easier for healthcare providers to exchange relevant patient data and track patient care-no matter where they go.

Interoperability can be a powerful tool for all healthcare providers, but even more so for rural and community hospitals. Often the patient populations served by these smaller hospitals have no choice but to seek care from facilities using independent health data networks. Interoperability, along with healthcare information exchanges (HIE) can work to improve care transitions for both rural and community hospitals, which can lead to better health outcomes for a critical patient population.

Interoperability is a patient-focused enterprise designed to ensure seamless care continuity. It's a healthcare initiative that has far-reaching applications and a new concept MEDHOST is helping support.

If you have questions and want to learn more about how MEDHOST is promoting interoperability, feel free to email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call us at 1.800.383.6278.

Transcript

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Hi, I'm Brian Laskaris, Director of interoperability at MEDHOST once I was asked how I would explain interoperability to a five-year-old. And even though it's a big word with eight syllables it's really focused on one core goal: making it easier to exchange relevant patient data and track the patient's progress throughout their care.

This is especially important for community-based providers. Unlike large urban health systems with hospitals and clinics that are typically on the same EHR, rural patients may transition from a local facility to a hospital in another city and state. And then back to their primary care physician. All of which may be on different EHRs. And at every exchange their health information should be easily accessible and shareable.

I like to use the analogy of interoperability being like the departure and arrival boards airports use to guide travel. Interoperability offers better visibility into a patient's journey, where they've been and where they need to go. However, controlling this amount of health data won't happen overnight and not through a single tower. The transition from paper-based records to EHRs is still relatively recent. In 2008 there was only a 10% adoption of EHRs. But the HiTECH Act in 2009 helped to accelerate that. Adoption was the first step, and now TEFCA is helping accelerate the next step, which is different EHRs sending and receiving patient information in a standardized manner across networks. TEFCA which is the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement has outlined six guiding principles for the health care industry to use to accomplish this.

At MEDHOST, we believe these six principles are essential for achieving industry wide interoperability. As facilities prepare their own interoperability initiatives, fueled by these core TEFCA principles, we'd like to suggest one additional idea. Call it a seventh principle, and its participation. Promoting interoperability is an important part of improving the future of health care in America, but it can't be solved by just the government and individual entities alone.

It will take a team effort. MEDHOST is all in on the move towards interoperability, constantly seeking out new ways we can expand integrations for our each EHR solutions and health care technology platforms. But ultimately, we're committed to this because we want to help our customers provide the best possible clinical care to the patients and communities they serve. And we look forward to partnering with you to achieve this goal.

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What is Interoperability and Why Participation is Key | MEDHOST

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MEDHOST's Director of Interoperability gives a quick breakdown on one of the most critical challenges facing the healthcare IT sector, especially EHR providers. In this video, Laskaris talks about what interoperability is, how it has evolved, what it will take to achieve, and why full-on participation is important for its success.