Questions to ask about interoperability during EHR purchasing decision

November 29, 2018

Leona Rajaee

As the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) has recently published a report on the need to drive interoperability between electronic health records (EHRs), many healthcare providers may be asking how to purchase an EHR solution that enables that critical interoperability. An EHR Intelligence article has outlined a number of questions to be asked during the purchasing decision.

Those questions include:

Does the EHR vendor adhere to industry standards?
Does the EHR vendor work with interoperability services providers?
Does the EHR product’s level of interoperability align with organizational needs?

There are resources available to determine the answers to some of these questions. For example, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) provides information about vendors that meet the 2015 Edition Health IT Certification Criteria for certified EHR technology (CEHRT). In addition, ONC provides information about which vendors use the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a specification for exchanging clinical and administrative health care data. Healthcare providers can also include these questions in their requests for proposals (RFPs) issued to EHR vendors during the purchasing process.

Interoperability is critical for the exchange of information between healthcare providers and is particularly beneficial to care managers in their work in coordinating care for patients. Care managers have been shown to be effective particularly in the care of patients with complex or chronic conditions. However, a 2016 study on care coordination and interoperability “identified multiple areas where the lack of interoperability leads to inefficient processes and missing data” and found that “significant care coordination gaps exist due to the lack of interoperability across the United States.”

The NAM publication emphasizes that “Digital interoperability across clinicians, care units, facilities, and systems has become more essential because of increasing complexity in health care, the need for more seamless interfaces among clinicians, patients and families, and the growing number of clinicians across disparate specialties that a typical patient sees.”

Asking the right questions during the purchasing process can result in EHR interoperability benefiting the independent physician, the case manager, and most importantly, the patient.