Interoperability: A goal and an ethical responsibility

As the number and complexity of medical devices continues to increase, it is more important than ever for the healthcare industry to overcome barriers that prevent full interoperability and data sharing, argue two physicians from the Center for Medical Interoperability.

Michael Johns, MD, founding chairman of the Center for Medical Interoperability (CMI), and William Stead, MD, chairman of CMI’s Technical Advisory Committee, write that “lack of plug-and-play interoperability can compromise patient safety, impact care quality and outcomes, contribute to clinician fatigue and waste billions of dollars a year.”

“Picture a patient in a hospital bed surrounded by monitors, an infusion pump, a ventilator and a pulse oximeter,” Johns and Stead said. “This equipment is typically purchased from different manufacturers and each comes with its own proprietary interface technology.”

For healthcare IT professionals, that means spending a lot of time trying to integrate disparate devices into the network so they can share data – if the devices can even connect. Many older devices have no connectivity capability, requiring providers to read and enter data manually. To pull together data from this growing galaxy of medical devices, healthcare IT typically must invest in middleware to enable data exchange.

“As healthcare professionals, and as an industry, we can no longer accept the status quo,” Johns and Snead write. “Integrating medical devices, a source of objective biometric and clinical data, in a plug-and-play way needs to be a national priority. The entities buying, deploying and using these technologies — hospitals and health systems — must unite to solve their shared technical challenges and work with vendors to compel change.”

The benefits of device interoperability, they said, include helping providers:

· Avoid or minimize adverse events, transcription errors, and redundant testing

· Free up staff time spent on entering data

· Reduce length of patient hospital stays through faster information sharing

“We must make it easier for healthcare professionals to perform the work they’re passionate about — taking care of people,” they write, concluding: “We have an ethical obligation to develop and implement plug-and-play clinical devices and information technology systems.”

The non-profit Center for Medical Interoperability was formed in 2013. Members include hospitals and health systems across the U.S.