The International Patient Summary (IPS) is a key standard for global interoperability. Its goal is to create a common foundation for patient summary exchange across borders and ensure the ability to share key information with caregivers whenever and wherever needed. Several nations and international organizations have selected the IPS as a baseline for their summaries, and recently major electronic health record (EHR) and health information technology (IT) vendors have shared their planned implementations. These include Epic, MEDITECH, CommonHealth, Google, Patient Centric Solutions, VeroSource and Verto Health. Like many successful standards, today’s progress has been years in the making.
The healthcare industry is in a state of rapid innovation. From aggregated health data apps to telemedicine and digital front doors, the pandemic has propelled consumer demand for innovative and enhanced healthcare solutions. Additionally, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) mandates on interoperability and HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) have accelerated this innovation by helping bring multiple healthcare stakeholders together to provide better access to quality health data across the board.
Within this context, digital healthcare interoperability has now become a digital supply chain challenge as healthcare providers must retrieve data or information from systems of record, such as electronic health record (EHR) systems, into destination systems and consumers across multiple organizational boundaries while ensuring security and data privacy.
The pandemic taught us that innovation is key in healthcare - organizations with unique digital experiences thrived while those that struggled to adapt suffered. Consumer expectations have also soared in recent years as patients and members expect a frictionless digital experience from their healthcare organizations and access to their data across the healthcare ecosystem. Interoperability - the ability to share the right data across stakeholders, is a key, if not the most important, building block of this movement.