"Improving Healthcare Interoperability Project"
The report provides a realistic view of clinical registries currently, and also points to the future opportunities.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The healthcare ecosystem is in a state of flux with respect to the interoperability of clinical data. The call for healthcare data interoperability – and the promise of clinical data informing the learning healthcare system – is neither new nor novel, with work toward accomplishing the goal of data liquidity involving countless stakeholders extending across multiple decades. Despite the general acknowledgement of the need for interoperability, a plethora of initiatives, and federal leadership, the current state is quite distanced from the envisioned goal.
This project, Improving Healthcare Data Interoperability (the Project), intended to evaluate the state of healthcare data semantic interoperability and suggest recommendations for the roadmap forward, specifically from the perspective of clinical registries. The focus on clinical registries was purposeful – these registries produce actionable data for quality improvement and patient safety and should thus be at the centre of healthcare data interoperability. The key technical goals were to 1) determine the scope ofthe problem, by identifying core common clinical concepts captured across a large sample of registries and determining the degree of concordance of registry database (physical) representations with commondata models and national / international data standards, and 2) create an authoritative implementation guidance targeting database developers for the programming of the common core clinical concepts suchthat interoperability would be intrinsic to those data elements and not require a translation layer to communicate between computer systems. The findings of the technical work were then to informrecommendations for registry owners (and the larger healthcare ecosystem) regarding the roadmap forward.