Health Care is notoriously slow at adopting change. The fact that many hospitals still have their records on paper is a testimony to the slow adoption of technology.
Interoperability is a major issue in the HealthCare industry. By interoperability, I mean the way Health Records are shared, searched, and queried.
The two major stumbling blocks in interoperability are:
Problem :
A very weird and shocking thing in health care is that there is no Universal Patient Identifier. There are and have been attempts to implement it but there are still no results to show for it.
This makes identifying patients a nightmare resulting in the following issues :
“Statistics show that up to one in five patient records are not accurately matched even within the same health care system. As many as half of the patient records are mismatched when data is transferred between health care systems. Matching the correct individual to his or her health data is critical to their medical care” - CBMI Director Shaun Grannis, MD, MS.
The failure in patient identification leads to a decrease in health care and also might cause harm to the patient.