The Importance of Interoperability in Emergency Departments

Interoperability plays a critical role for health systems, hospitals and emergency departments.

Chris Klomp, CEO of Collective Medical, spent time at HIMSS with Inside Digital Health™ emphasizing the importance of information sharing in emergency departments.

Klomp told us that emergency departments are an episodic-care channel that operate in silos. Individuals don’t have relationships with the physicians that treat them in the emergency department, and patients don’t go into the emergency department and request who they want to see.

This physician is likely seeing the patient for the first time — with no previous knowledge about the individual’s medical history — and likely under serious circumstances.

Interoperability enables information to go across the healthcare continuum to help the emergency department physician make the best possible decision for the patient to return to a healthy state.

Klomp added that it’s not just data interoperability that’s important, but clinical interoperability needs to occur. Emergency department clinicians need to interact and interoperate with one another, as well as with primary care providers and skilled nursing facilities.

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