Interoperability: Quick Route To Better Care

Critic chides policymakers for downplaying standards and usability in Meaningful Use Stage 1 at American Medical Informatics Association meeting.

Healthcare quality and efficiency could move forward 20 years in a matter of months if only there were true interoperability of electronic health information, according to a noted critic of the health IT industry. In the opinion of University of Pennsylvania sociologist Ross Koppel, interoperability would help unlock "rich, extraordinary data that would make medicine more wonderful." Koppel offered this assessment at last week's American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) annual conference in Chicago, where he participated in a panel about why interoperability was "taking so darn long," as AMIA put it.

"I think we're working at the margins to address problems that are systemic and need to be addressed at the systemic level," Koppel told InformationWeek Healthcare afterwards. During the session, Koppel argued that the Meaningful Use program that encourages adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) was based on an idea first floated three decades ago by health IT vendors to sell more software with the help of government subsidies. While the goals of Meaningful Use -- to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare delivery -- may be noble, Koppel said that policymakers have been too focused on EHR features and not enough on usability...