Healthcare organizations are seeking semantic interoperability and find themselves challenged by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) that prevent them smoothly exchanging information. This interesting news came to us from HIT Infrastructure in their article, “FHIR May Not Help Healthcare Orgs Achieve Semantic Interoperability.”
Healthcare organizations that are participating in the value-based care environment are looking for strong, secure data pipelines that can help them communicate across disparate health systems to coordinate and streamline patient care. The ultimate goal of complete semantic interoperability would realize the ability to seamlessly exchange information that can be accepted, read, and understood across any system created by any health IT vendor.
Unfortunately, while FHIR is a step in the right direction, the standard must be developed and deployed in a manner that avoids duplication of a fragmented and siloed technical interoperability landscape. For instance, different electronic health record systems may prefer to ingest and display medication data in only one of these formats. While many systems offer cross capabilities to translate one coding set into another, the process can be imprecise and leave providers with confusing, incorrect, or missing information.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
