| | September 20179systems need to be built on. Take the example - when we make a telephone call, we can make a call from phones of different manufacturers and there are many telecom exchanges from which the call has to traverse before being connected. This would never have been possible but for the interoperability standards adhered to by the telecom companies. The same can be said for Interoperability in a healthcare context. The systems whether they are imaging products, software products (eg. PACS, EMR) or hospital information system it is imperative that they need to seamlessly be able to connect and exchange data/information and understand it. The information could be related to patient data or imaging data or any data pertaining to a hospital. This needs to traverse seamlessly at the least, across the same hospital if not across different hospitals to start with. The advantages of ensuring that systems are interoperable in healthcare are immense: · Speed of Care: The availability of patient data to a clinician, be it from the radiology department or EMRs or other Hospital information systems in a timely manner can help the clinician handle more patients effectively, thereby becoming more productive. · Cost of Care: Reduced manual intervention and aggregated information from multiple systems in a hospital can facilitate seamless flow of information from multiple systems within the hospital or across multiple branches of the hospital, thereby reducing the cost of operations and the cost of providing care. · Accuracy of Diagnosis: Interoperable systems can help in better diagnosis. Take for example the early detection of cancer. Information from multiple sources like imaging data, pathology data and other patient data when viewed together can really help better diagnosis influencing the outcome. · Open Sourced Care: If systems are connected and in-teroperable between different hospitals, then this allows a patient to choose and change hospitals based on his/her choice with the assurance that his/her data can be seamless-ly be moved between hospitals · Population Health Management: Aggregation of data from multiple systems and multiple hospitals help in data analytics that can help in population health management and prevent or contain the outbreak of diseases. Although, interoperability in healthcare is the need of the hour and can address many existing healthcare prob-lems, it does not come without its challenges. One of the primary needs for interoperability is consistency and stan-dardization, which means that all the entities involved have to agree to set criterias. In healthcare, standards provide a common language and set of expectations that enable interoperability between systems and/or devices. Ideally, data exchange schema and standards should permit data to be shared between clinician, lab, hospital, pharmacy, and patient regardless of application or vendor in order to seamlessly digest information about an individual and im-prove the overall coordination and delivery of healthcare. The New Health policy approved by the cabinet ear-lier this year is a big step to making healthcare in India affordable and accessible. This policy proposes the setting up of health Information exchange by 2025. This will al-low Private and Government hospitals to hook onto this infrastructure and share information as required. For this to happen it is important that there is appropriate interopera-ble standards defined and governance across the healthcare industry to ensure that this is adhered to. One of the primary needs for interoperability is consistency and standardization, which means that all the entities involved have to agree to set criteria
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