Improving Interoperability By Moving From Perfection To Pragmatism

Thanks to ongoing progress in the interoperability of medical information across US health care, clinicians can increasingly view patient data from other sites of care in their local electronic health record (EHR)—a huge leap forward. Unfortunately, these data typically exist separate and apart from the local data in their EHR—effectively co-locating but not combining different medication lists, problem lists, laboratory results, and so forth. When data are viewable but not combined, clinicians are less likely to use data from outside sources; cognitive effort is spent marrying local EHR data with outside data (for example, moving between two or more problem lists, medication lists, or encounter lists); and time is consumed manually reconciling outside data with local data. Furthermore, unreconciled outside data typically cannot be included in clinical notes or used to drive decision support.