“Cerner is … committed to an open healthcare ecosystem… to enabling data liquidity for every product … to enabling our solutions to send and receive data in a universal manner … to putting these principals to work for every system in every venue of care.”

In other words, Cerner is willing to do everything Epic is not.

Again, while the commitment to data exchange is progress, we are still just talking about exchanging data, not true interoperability. Let’s look at a couple of definitions.

From the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Glossary definition on Wikipedia:

The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged.

So narrowly tailored, this concept might be better defined as “interface-ability” or simply data exchange. And it completely lacks context, which matters a lot to those of us in health IT. There is no mention of the technical challenge and costs. There is no concept of separate systems operating together, which is requisite. And there is no mention of the alternatives.

Compare that with another interoperability definition found on Wikipedia:

Interoperability is a property of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, present or future, without any restricted access or implementation.

This definition, much closer to genuine interoperability, is arguably what Kenneth Mandl and Isaac Kohane of Harvard Medical School had in mind in 2011 when they published “Escaping the EHR Trap – The Future of Health IT” in the New England Journal of Medicine:

“We believe that EHR vendors propagate the myth that health IT is qualitatively different from industrial and consumer products in order to protect their prices and market share and block new entrants…”

Speaking to InformationWeek later on, Kohane went further and named names:

“Leading companies like Epic will claim that it’s unsafe for health IT to be done outside their monolithic system and that their monolithic system is actually enabling patient safety and the correct conduct of healthcare process.”

Mandle and Kohane describe an interoperability that goes beyond mere interfaces and data exchange. Indeed, the fulcrum of this advanced interoperability is open application programming interfaces (APIs), which enable applications to quickly, easily and affordably integrate with the core EHR. Think of all those iPhone apps in the iTunes store and then recall that Apple doesn’t even make open systems.

Right now open APIs are most frequently associated with the Web and work being done by companies like Facebook, Google, Salesforce and LinkedIn, which might seem irrelevant but is anything but. True interoperability in healthcare will result from tightly secured Web-based applications that enable a circle of accountable clinicians to work together with optimal patient health—not a billable test or procedure—as the ultimate goal. Does that sound like something simple data exchange can accomplish?