HL7 and Interoperability: What Really Defines Interoperability?.

HL7 Interoperability is Critical for Success

What should an open electronic health record look like? It’s something that more and more radiology IT professionals are considering today, particularly where HL7 is concerned. A lot of emphasis is being put on interoperability, because it’s becoming more important than it ever has before.

There are a number of things related to interoperability that healthcare providers should be aware of moving forward. First, every organization should be able to extract patient records and at the same time maintain their structured data down to the granular level. Furthermore, any authorized user within the facility should be able to transmit patient records to any authorized clinician, whether it’s the full record or only portions of it. And this should be completed without losing any of the structured data.

Healthcare organizations that are in a decentralized health information exchange should also be able to accept programmatic requests from an external electronic health records system and send back information – all in standard format. If they choose to move their patient records to a new EHR system, they should be able to do so, without complications. Finally, healthcare organizations should be able to embed encapsulated functionality in their EHR with a programming interface.

Most healthcare providers share a common goal, and that’s to generate interoperability that leads to the best patient care possible. There has been a great level of progress toward that goal in recent years, particularly with cloud-based solutions that include handling HL7 data. Some HL7 users aren’t happy though and are calling on Congress to create a stronger legal interoperability standard for healthcare IT.

The reason for the push is because to many providers, interoperability is the key to success. Data exchanges are among the entities that need to enter the mix to gain better interoperability, better workflow and utilization. Rather than limiting the kinds of data being accessed and shared, clinicians in a variety of facilities should get unfettered access to patient records whenever they need it, and in the way they want to receive it.

It wasn’t that long ago that the technology didn’t exist to achieve this type of interoperability with HL7 data. However, with medical image management companies like OffSite Image Management, Inc., healthcare providers are finding new and efficient ways of accessing, archiving and sharing data, even HL7 data.

OffSite administrators recognized more than a year ago how important it is for clients to not only have excellent access to their medical imaging, but also their patient data related to the HL7 standard. OffSite created a solution where clients can log in to the OffSite cloud-based solution and view their data in a structured format. No other vendor is offering such a solution, which is why OffSite maintains its status as an industry leader in cloud-based solutions for the healthcare industry.

We are helping to define what interoperability is today, and with every new client, we’re expanding our outreach and giving organizations large and small what they’ve long been looking for.