Many health information exchanges across the country are experiencing financial and technical challenges when it comes to achieving interoperability, according to a recent survey from the eHealth Initiative.
Seventy-four of the 135 survey respondents (mostly HIEs and including 26 healthcare delivery organizations) pointed to the cost of building EHR interfaces as the top challenge to interoperability. Other main obstacles include:
- Getting consistent and timely responses from EHR vendor interface developers (64 organizations reported as a concern)
- The technical difficulty of building out the EHR interfaces (48)
- Identifying and implementing standards (31)
- Managing unrealistic end user expectations (26)
- Normalizing data feeds (22)
- Patient-matching (21)
- Troubleshooting errors (4)
More articles on interoperability:
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Arkansas Children's Hospital connects to HIE
JASON task force: Let market forces drive interoperability