How Does Interoperability in Healthcare Enable Better Patient Care and Efficiency?

Interoperability is a crucial aspect of the healthcare system at every level. And for medical materials managers, evaluating the interoperability of clinical accessories prior to purchasing them can not only save time for physicians but also money for hospitals down the line.

Clinician showing the phone to a patient

Ensuring that clinical accessories can work with a variety of equipment also provides medical materials managers with more choices and freedom during the purchasing process. Most importantly, achieving interoperability in healthcare at the clinical accessory level can improve patient care and safety and increase efficiency.

Levels of Hospital Interoperability

There are three levels of interoperability: foundational, structural, and semantic.

At the foundational level, data can be exchanged between one system and another, but the receiving system is not required to interpret the data.
At the structural level, the format, syntax, and organization of data exchange is defined.
At the semantic level, systems can exchange and use the information that has been transmitted, and the data is standardized and coded, which allows the receiving system to interpret it.

In 2019, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society¹ (HIMSS) proposed a fourth organizational level of interoperability that includes governance, policy, legal, social, and organizational considerations to facilitate the secure, seamless, and timely exchange and use of data.

That same year, separate HIMSS² research found that, among 147 hospitals, health systems, and acute care facilities, 30 percent had achieved structural interoperability across health IT resources, and 29 percent had achieved semantic interoperability. However, 21 percent had only achieved foundational interoperability and had the most basic data exchange capability.

Why Is Interoperability in Healthcare Important?

Interoperability can be a huge boon for the healthcare system. In particular, it can improve patient care and safety by allowing information to be shared quickly and seamlessly between systems. If a patient gets hospitalized outside their own hospital system, a doctor at the treating hospital can request the patient's record for a more complete medical history. In an emergency situation, being able to send or request patient data between PCPs, specialists, and other clinicians instantaneously can improve a patient's chances of survival and recovery.

Additionally, hospital interoperability can increase efficiency by enhancing the ability to share relevant information for patient matching, according to the American Hospital Association³. This can free up time for clinical and administrative staff by reducing the need to manually confirm that a patient's data belongs to the correct person. Interoperable patient data⁴ also helps to ensure that patients receive the appropriate medications and tests while reducing the potential for duplicative or unnecessary ones.

Learn how GE Healthcare's clinical accessories can improve hospital interoperability.

How Interoperable Clinical Accessories Lead to Efficiencies

By helping to ensure that data exchanged between two devices is captured and interpreted accurately, interoperable clinical accessories can reduce the risk of preventable errors and serious inefficiencies, which is beneficial to the materials management team, clinicians, and patients. For the materials management team specifically, interoperable clinical accessories can make it easier to expand the capabilities of medical equipment or replace routinely used consumables.

One example of how interoperable clinical accessories can lead to efficiencies, cited in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine⁵, is a pulse oximeter finger probe that recognizes if its sensor is on the same limb as a blood pressure cuff. This awareness can help to prevent erroneous pulse oximeter values. If the probe and the cuff were not interoperable, the pulse oximeter would not be aware that the inflation from the blood pressure cuff was impeding the arterial and venous flow from that arm. The fact that the pulse oximeter and blood pressure cuff were interoperable helped to reduce the potential of an incorrect diagnosis, which could have led to inadequate or inappropriate treatment. There are also administrative and financial consequences that could result from an incorrect diagnosis.

The road to hospital interoperability is not an easy one, but it is one that is extremely beneficial to patients and hospital staff. Taking the time to evaluate the interoperability of clinical accessories prior to purchasing them can ensure the best outcomes for productivity, efficiency, and patient care.