In a recent article for HIT Consultant, Lee Miller, Juno Health’s deputy chief architect, discussed the chasm between care delivery across disciplines and interoperability of the tools they rely on to inform their decisions. He notes that interoperability is too often underdeveloped, leaving individual clinicians to work in silos and make decisions without a complete view of their patients' health picture.
Chief information officers (CIOs) have the power to implement technology to fill this gap and improve care, efficiency, and clinical insights. Explore the key takeaways below to support your organization.
Codified data unifies the care team.
Entire teams, from primary care providers to hospital staff members, come together to treat each patient, but they’ll be stuck treading water without visibility into a unified system with standardized data. Codified data enables different systems to speak the same language, so diverse function areas can coordinate on treatment plans.
How do you get there? Miller points to the United States Core Data for Interoperability and HL7 Clinical Document Architecture frameworks to enforce uniform data standards and create a plug-and-play integration across systems that eliminates time-consuming workarounds.
CIOs need to be proactive.
Interoperable tech adds to a growing list of priorities for CIOs that’s already headlined by cybersecurity and futureproofing initiatives. But Miller says it’s worth it to ensure care quality, legal compliance, and provider efficiency. His advice? CIOs should:
- Establish policies for structured governance to create checks and balances to ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance.
- Replace fragmented data-sharing practices and share full patient histories to mitigate improper treatment, negative outcomes, and malpractice issues.
Interoperability provides benefits across healthcare.
True interoperability has a trickle-down impact across healthcare, especially when it’s a core part of the electronic health record (EHR) tools you use every day. It impacts every layer of hospital functions, from patient treatment decisions and safety to accurate documentation, enabling CIOs, care teams, and providers to share unified data across systems and collaborate across care settings.
If EHR interoperability offers such a boost, why don’t more healthcare organizations revamp their tech approach? It comes down to time, with organizations already understaffed and working overtime. As Miller puts it, interoperability “isn’t always in place because of the effort it takes to deliver data.”
But it may well be worth it in the end when you consider these and other potential benefits:
- Verified data for enhanced patient safety
- Integration with clinical decision support tools
- Reduced manual work to free up time for patient care
Think about how hectic your day-to-day routine is now. Implement an interoperable EHR to improve patient care, lighten the load across IT and clinical teams, and mitigate burnout.
Streamline care delivery with an interoperable EHR.
Software interoperability in healthcare is like blueprints for a new house: If the contractors are working from different plans, it hurts the end results. Open up data visibility across the care continuum—and across your organization—with Juno EHR.
Juno EHR provides seamless integration of patient data across systems throughout the care continuum, helping teams connect and coordinate more closely than ever. Improve patient outcomes and ease workflow challenges with an EHR that’s made to be made yours.
Explore how our solution supports interoperability and reach out to discover the value of Juno EHR.
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