Adopting a Proactive Approach to HIT Interoperability Challenges

Healthcare organizations have long suffered from interoperability challenges since adopting digitized IT infrastructure. Tackling interoperability across an organization’s entire infrastructure can prove overwhelming to executives and IT staff at first glance. There is no silver bullet that will solve interoperability among health IT system, but understanding how to begin to adopt the right tools and develop a long term strategy will put these organizations on course to achieve a highly interoperable health IT system. Digital interoperability has plagued health IT infrastructure since the early 2000s. Organizations wanted to move to the web to reduce IT enterprise costs which was a massive incentive. Now organizations are faced with an entangled infrastructure of legacy systems and no clear solution to make them work together.“The hardest thing is understanding what interoperability really is,” Health2047 Managing Director of Technology Charles Aunger told HITInfrastrucutre.com. “If you relate interoperability to diabetes, diabetes is generally labeled, but there’s actually many different issues with blood sugar levels and other factors that can cause diabetes. It takes a long time to find out what the core root and the core diagnosis of the problems are.”