Why EHR Interoperability Requires Health IT Infrastructure

Elizabeth O'Dowd | HIT Infrastructure | June 20, 2017

EHR interoperability is a significant challenge for healthcare organizations especially if they don't have the health IT infrastructure to support it.

Healthcare organizations are still challenged by EHR interoperability, and are seeking health IT infrastructure tools to ensure data is accurately, efficiently, and securely shared. Eagle Physicians and Associates and Cone Health announced the successful exchange between the eClinicalWorks cloud-based EHR and the Epic EHR for improved EHR interoperability among multiple locations and health systems. Eagle Physicians needed a way to provide better quality care to patients as those individuals move among locations.

“With the six-hospital Cone Health as the only health system in town, we needed a bidirectional exchange to share patient records at the point of service, especially to make our data available to the ED and hospitalists,” Eagle Physicians and Associates Family Physician Dr. Robert Fried said in a statement.

Eagle Physicians and Associates selected the eClinicalWorks platform to bridge gaps between patient data exchange. Eagle Physician Associates is a multi-specialty group, meaning that it works with other organizations frequently. This requires the organization to constantly exchange patient data, driving the need for improved EHR interoperability. The eClinicalWorks Carequality Interoperability Framework assists Eagle Physician Associates in exchanging and sharing data with Cone Health and other partners, such as UNC-Chapel Hill Medical Center, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and Novant Health. Eagle Physician Associates uses the Framework with call use Epic EHRs...