In the 21st Century Cures Act, interoperability is defined as the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate and exchange data with ease. Then once the data moves between various applications, it should also be used with ease without any special effort on the part of the user.
Think back for a moment about your life in the healthcare system. Over the years, you’ve visited a lot of different medical practitioners for a variety of different things. You’ve seen:
A general practitioner for general care
Specialists for specific problems along the way
An x-ray technician when you thought you broke your ankle
The lab when your doctor requested blood work
A pharmacist to pick up your medication
An ob-gyn when you started your family
In and out you’ve weaved through medical facilities and doctors offices as you worked hard to stay as healthy as possible.
IT teams have a lot of challenges on their hands today. But I don’t have to tell you that. You’re battling them all the time.
What makes it even more strenuous is the speed at which new technology is being developed. Has your organization adopted AI? Or how about the Internet of Things: Are your medical devices becoming smarter every day?
The average healthcare organization now uses more than 900 different cloud-based services throughout their practice.
What do healthcare facilities worry about right now in 2018? According to a report put out by the ECRI Institute, one of the most significant concerns involves workarounds.
Workarounds occur when a staff member needs to get something done and doesn’t have the right tools or authority in place.
In 1950, the most popular names in America were James, Michael, and Robert for males, Mary, Linda, and Patricia for females. Now lets pair those names with a popular surname such as Smith, Johnson, or Williams. Do you have a few patients with any of those names? Turns out, it’s causing a growing problem in healthcare organizations.
Just a few years ago, most medical practices operated with paper records. As electronic records moved in to replace paper, the benefits were many.
Leaving paper files in a room is risky. By digitizing the records, you can keep them under lock and key.
What does the term “Wi-Fi” mean? Wi-Fi is a way of referring to a wireless version of a wired Ethernet network, a way of connecting computers and electronic devices to each other and the internet.
Even a few years ago, the number of connections within a facility wasn’t difficult to handle.
Remember when our desktops worked solely from the use of floppy disks? We couldn’t imagine ever needing more storage.
How things change.
Back in 2015, Cisco Systems estimated by the year 2020, we would have 50 billion connected devices generating 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes of data every year.
Cloud computing is no longer out of the ordinary; it’s our norm.
A recent survey showed that 85 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, with 41 percent of their workloads operating in public clouds while 28 percent operate in private clouds.
We’ve spoken quite a bit around here about the Internet of Things and its impact on society. It’s hard to ignore when predictions indicate more than 50 billion items in the world will all be interconnected by 2020.
And each of those items will bring about their own risks and rewards to our society.