Benefits of Interoperability Solutions for Healthcare Industry
The global healthcare system is witnessing a switch from paper-based method of recording patient data to electronically record the same. The reasons for this transition are to prevent the loss of these records, and to store vital information for treating a patient. While the trend is picking up worldwide, the U.S. was one of the first countries to introduce a roadmap for interoperability.
Since then, the concept of interoperability solutions has been promoted with different initiatives such as NHS Long Term Plan in UK, the iEHR initiative of Canada, and National EHR Program of Spain, among others.
Interoperability solutions in Healthcare Market could be defined as the ability of systems to exchange and interpret data among them in a coordinated manner while keeping the meaning of the data intact. In the healthcare system, the interoperability operates at four levels, namely, foundational, structural, semantic, and organizational. The ONC has made a roadmap for the implementation of interoperability in the U.S. as is represented by the following figure.
The interoperability solutions in the healthcare market has garnered a lot of attention from 2016–2019. The industry has witnessed 14 partnerships and collaborations, 14 mergers and acquisitions, 12 product launches, eight funding activities, four expansion activities, and three recognition activities respectively.
The importance of the implementation of interoperability has been widely recognized by the different stakeholders of the industry, however, the response to the concept has not been very welcoming.
Various advantages such as improvement in time management, care coordination, efficiency, medical research is overshadowed by the lack of regulations, data privacy concerns, reluctancy of providers and EHR vendors for data exchange, and absence of a unique patient identifier.
The U.S. has always been an early adopter of the technology and similar is the case of Interoperability Solutions in Healthcare Market. In U.S., Wisconsin’s EHR adoption and interoperability rate is more than the national average, but the complete interoperability has not been established yet. Though interoperability has penetrated the country, the most as compared to other countries, there is still lot of potential for the development. The country is expected to hold $1.32 billion of the total market and is expected to grow with a CAGR of 5.8% by the end of 2025.
In Europe the major reasons for the development of interoperability are increase in aging population, increasing chronic diseases, and rising concerns regarding cost, safety, and efficiency of the region’s healthcare system. Out of the major economies of the region, Spain is the most interoperable country. The reasons for deep penetration of the interoperability in the healthcare system of the country are the openness to the concept, and different national and regional initiatives in that direction. U.K. has the basic infrastructure for interoperability due to the vast network of NHS hospitals and the usage of intranet within the system made them interoperable to some extent, but only 43% of the system’s hospitals were interoperable outside the system with other hospitals.
