As reported in this week’s Wall Street Journal blog, the lack of information exchange is one of the key obstacles to the success of digital health records. As it is known and reiterated in the article, there is a lot of government funding being thrown at solving the problem, but that money will surely dry up before full connectivity is reached throughout the healthcare ecosystem.
This was exactly the point of my recent article in Healthcare IT News, Achieving HIE Sustainability: Leveraging Information to Realize Success: In short, connectivity is the key to allowing top-level applications to access data which then translate into revenue by both the contributors and consumers of this information. If you spend all of your government grants or precious revenue on top-level applications and can’t get the connectivity, HIEs cannot be sustained. And this doesn’t help the ecosystem that wants to exchange information with one another in order to improve overall health care.
Take a look at the article, and let me know what you think.
Until next time,
Gary