According to French healthcare innovation think-tank LIR, by 2020, global healthcare data is expected to reach a gargantuan 2.3 billion gigabytes.

But this extraordinary amount of information needs to be in the right hands to be truly effective. Clinicians and carers can work smarter - and provide good quality, effective care for patients - only if they have fast, reliable access to patient information.

The challenge that has historically faced healthcare providers is how to ensure that information flows safely and effectively to the appropriate healthcare professional, no matter where they are.

A simple solution for health IT interoperability

A new guide by healthcare software firm Enovacom emphasises the vital role that interoperability plays in this area. Beyond boundaries: the interoperability world tour showcases some of the most powerful best-practice case studies taken from healthcare settings from around the globe and answers some of the questions readers might have about what interoperability is - and how to attain it.

In one example from Switzerland, leading diagnostics service provider, Unilabs, had no way to supervise or monitor data exchange and were using three IT solutions that were unable to communicate with each other. They wanted to overhaul the way they organised data transfer and needed a way to effectively manage health-oriented data flows.

They used enterprise application integration (or EAI) to automate data exchange between their labs and their doctors, consolidating their interfaces through one single, easy to use ‘plug and play’ interoperability platform, reducing the number of tools the team had to use to automate data exchange between laboratories and clinicians.

“From now on, interoperability is central to the service offered by Unilabs to its 4000 doctors,” says Unilabs IT director, Thierry Mϋller. “We are able to get them the results they need on time every time and ensure the information is transferred securely.”

Mϋller sees interoperability playing a strategic role in developing the health sector over coming years. “To me, it’s clear that the future will be much more based on automatically, securely and reliably exchanging sensitive data, ranging from prescribing analyses to transferring results to doctors and patients,” he adds.

Canada, meanwhile, claims to have saved one billion Canadian dollars – the equivalent of 5.6 million emergency visits - through recent technology deployments. And it attributes this success in large part to its investment in interoperability solutions over two decades.

Improved outcomes

“If you can make a clinician’s job more manageable, reduce the risk of a medical error, enhance the patient’s experience of care or become a more efficient service to treat more people, then you are contributing to [...] safer and quality patient care and improved outcomes,” concludes the guide. And this is the promise of interoperability.

To learn more, read the Enovacom report.