I just finished reading Victoria Brock’s excellent post Stop! Just stop with the “Interoperability”. In it she expresses the frustrations with healthcare systems vendors that represent their products as “interoperable” to non-IT buyers, knowing that those people will assume the best of what interoperability could mean. This is a phenomenon of human nature that I blogged about 12 years ago!

I agree with Brock. We need to educate our colleagues involved in reviewing clinical IT systems to stop asking the Interoperability Question. It is too vague and gives the vendors a chance to say yes to a different question than what is truly being asked. We need to train our non-IT colleagues to think about what they mean when they say interoperability. We need to give them examples of alternative questions, such as:

• How will the medication list in your system automatically reconcile with the medication list in our core EHR? Where have you done this?
• How will the allergy list in your system automatically reconcile with the medication list in our core EHR?

Brock reminds us that these interoperability questions involve three parties, the two application vendors and the client. Because something is possible doesn’t mean it will happen of all three parties are not committed to the work. We need to educate our colleagues that these interoperability questions cannot be answered by one party alone.

Those of us that are very clear about the the problem we are trying to solve and the new problems we are trying to avoid will have the most success.