Interoperability

The director of international relations at NHS Confederation, Dr Layla McCay writes about significant acceleration of digital transformation across the UK.

Florian Marcus, analyst at e-Estonia briefing centre, writes about eHealth services in the Baltic country and their response to COVID-19.

The 10-year-old National Broadband Plan identified three nationwide gaps: IT adoption by healthcare providers, information utilization by them and connectivity to patients. In many places, those gaps still remain.

Professor Maureen Baker, chair of the Professional Records Standards Body, writes about the organisation's work to help build a fully integrated health and care system in the UK.

Accurate outbreak data reporting depends on a robust, standards-based and interoperable information infrastructure. We still have a long way to go.

When we talk about connected care and interoperability, we tend to do so within an outdated framework that prioritises ‘medicine’ over ‘health’. We shouldn’t get stuck there, writes Dr Charles Alessi, HIMSS International chief clinical officer.

In a region of 10 million residents, the nonprofit Los Angeles Network for Enhanced Services is helping achieve care coordination, closing care gaps when providers are able to access data at the point of care, using a central interoperable platform.

The ability to gain access to the data through reusable APIs significantly improves developer productivity, enabling CIOs to achieve more with the same resources.

Despite their apparent promise to advance interoperability of clinical and claims data, exactly when the Blue Button 2.0 and MyHealthEData initiatives that CMS unveiled at HIMSS18 will be fully implemented remains unclear.

While last year was focused on capturing useful data, now we need to draw insights from that data across the entire care continuum.