Health care providers are becoming well versed in the language of information technology. Concepts like health information exchange (HIE) are widely understood and adopted as health records must be shared across and among organizations. Another term, "interoperability," is also moving from the IT glossary to medical usage.

"Interoperability is really a tool, solution or method of resolving a problem," said Toni Skokovic, VP Product Management, Merge Healthcare, OEM Division. "It is really about driving an efficient health care system --from a cost perspective-- where money spent on health care delivery by and large is utilized on the care delivery itself.... Another aspect is enabling a more effective health care system in that all of the decisions that are made over the course of care delivery are done on the basis of having full access to all of the information available about the patient."

When everything is clicking along, any health care provider could access patient history, medications, test results, medical images, etc. on any device including a smart phone. Whether it's a family doctor, specialist, or post-operative care giver, everyone would be on the same (electronic) page.

"For us to think about interoperability, we take as broad of a data scope as possible of the full information domain around a patient. When we talk about information we are talking about anything from initial encounter records about initial complaint, to laboratory results, to diagnostic images and results, pathology images and results, to any sort of cardiac assessment analysis. Combining all that together to complete the picture of the patient's particular situation or a continued history, which is extremely important for chronic condition [management]," Skokovic said.

The reason this degree of medical intelligence is possible today, is because several data standards have become widely accepted, allowing information sharing of software products from many companies. Two of these standards are DICOM for medical imaging and HL7 for patient record data.

"A lesson learned from the financial and insurance industries and all the commercial domains that have fully embraced information technology is that proprietary formats and integrations lead to very expensive migrations that work to the detriment of the users. So this is where interoperability based on standards is a key element to enabling innovation in health care technology," he said. "The good news is that over the last 10 to 15 years, emergence of standards-based interfacing has progressed ...Which is a great foundation to start a practical, working, implementation of interoperability. We already have a good enough starting point for sharing what is available and that adds tremendous value."

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