Here’s How Interoperability Can Improve Patient Care
As technology advances, healthcare organizations have begun to access the most up-to-date and secure solutions for better data. Patients today demand their health information to be accessible when they move from one provider to the next, and some of the country’s largest digital companies have indicated that they’re working on a solution to make that happen: healthcare interoperability. Reducing wait times, minimizing errors, and enhancing the overall quality of healthcare has made healthcare significantly affordable. This shift has been sparked by healthcare interoperability.
This is how interoperability can help to increase care quality.
1. Medical Errors are reduced
According to a recent study, medical error rates in the United States are much higher than in other industrialised countries, making finding a solution to lower them even more urgent. Interoperability allows organisations to share data across systems and apps, reducing the risk of medical errors. Healthcare organisations can better minimise errors caused by missing or incomplete patient data by developing and implementing improved interoperability with the goal of capturing and interpreting data across systems and apps. This gives caregivers a greater understanding of how and why errors happen and gives them the power to intervene.
2. Improves efficiency while lowering expenses
Providing data to care providers in real time and in a consistent manner can help an organisation run more efficiently. An emergency room patient, for example, may require blood testing, which will cost the healthcare system time and money. A medical provider might access the patient’s health record and discover that blood tests were already performed earlier in the week because to interoperable data across organisations. In some situations, that information could be useful, allowing the patient to receive better care sooner.
A seamless exchange of health data will reduce not only the administrative chores that physicians frequently conduct, but also the repetitive tasks that physicians typically perform, such as patient data entry. This will assist to prevent physician burnout, which will have a significant influence on the quality of care provided while also resulting in cost savings and more efficient workflows.
3. Establishes strong national networks
The production and exchange of aggregated patient health information across many electronic health record (EHR) suppliers allows for more accurate tracking and better care quality. Interoperable systems can considerably improve health outcomes, cut health-care costs, and improve the patient experience by more effectively sharing data. Everyone can be more involved in their own health care with easy access to data.
4. It improves the coordination of care.
Providers, patients, and caregivers can make fully informed care decisions with up-to-date patient data at their fingertips. People who have access to their own medical records and histories can make better clinical judgments and become more involved in their own care. Interoperability allows us to access patients’ records across care venues, rather than requiring referred patients to sign into several portals and bring boxes of health records to their first session.
5. It enhances the patient experience.
Patients are frequently required to perform administrative activities such as searching for papers, filling out many forms, re-explaining their symptoms or medical history, and coordinating insurance coverage (both before and often after receiving care). Interoperability has the potential to greatly improve this process, providing patients with faster, more accurate, and coordinated care while also improving their entire experience.
6. It improves patient safety.
When implementing interoperability, the key care and regulatory problems to consider are patient privacy and security. This is a difficult undertaking, but it may assist improve patient data privacy and security by requiring enterprises to review where their protected health information (PHI) is stored and with whom it needs to be shared. It’s difficult to track all systems that handle PHI, as required by the HIPAA Security Rule, when firms enter data into systems that can’t communicate with one another.
However, EHR integration gives clinicians peace of mind that the PHI they enter is secure. Organizations gain a better understanding of where their data lives and who has access to it when PHI is integrated into secure, interoperable systems, which helps them secure patient data and protect privacy.
7. More precise statistics on public health
When interoperability is established, IT systems can interact in such a way that public health data can be collected and interpreted more quickly and accurately. This can assist organisations in responding to urgent questions from patients and clinicians. Interoperability allows healthcare organisations to collectively educate one another on forecasting and avoiding outbreaks by easing the sharing and interpretation of such health data.
Last Thoughts
It will take a long time to achieve genuine interoperability in healthcare. However, it is a worthwhile endeavour because the advantages have the potential to significantly improve patient care. You can start your route to interoperability with the ultimate objective of enhancing patient care if you have a thorough understanding of real interoperability within your healthcare system and a vision for patient care.
