Health Interoperability

Name

Institutional Affiliation

Health Interoperability

Interoperability is necessary to ensure the effective delivery of healthcare services. Interoperability refers to healthcare systems within and across an organization working together by sharing information to enhance the adequate provision of services for a given individual or community. Information may be exchanged in different levels from foundational, structural, and semantic to the organizational level. Clinical data is shared in all these levels to facilitate “access to and retrieval of clinical data to provide safe, timely, efficient, effective and equitable patient-centered care” (HIMSS, 2015). However, healthcare interoperability is affected by specific privacy implications because most patients expect confidentiality to be maintained.

A potential interoperability use case with privacy implications is a patient referral, where a patient is referred to another healthcare facility or healthcare provider. Structural, clinical, and administrative information about the patient and the referral request will have to be shared by the health information systems. These data will then determine if the referral request will be accepted or rejected or whether more information is required. Exchange of patient information between two professional physicians when processing a patient’s referral request is essential. This is because it ensures that both organizations’ EHRs facilitate a referral request smoothly and efficiently. Such information may include a patient’s personal information, lab tests, diagnosis, and treatment if any (HIMSS, 2015).

In this use case, the privacy implications of data sharing include the inability to standardize interoperability formats for data sharing by the different EHR services due to the different use of clinical terminologies, technical specifications, and functional capabilities. If the security features of all healthcare information systems are not similar, a patient’s essential information will be vulnerable to exposure. Another scenario is where inaccurate patient information is shared. The system providing the...