2016 ACC/ASE/ASNC/HRS/SCAI Health Policy Statement on Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise
August 15, 2016—Interoperability is important partly because it facilitates easier extraction of accurate, high-quality data from clinical records. Clinical research and quality measurement are both, in turn, dependent on this data extraction. Presently, this is a time- and labor-intensive process that requires substantial resourcing. Data are the fundamental building blocks of clinical research and observational registries. Methods such as adoption of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) standards and profiles can increase autopopulation of NCDR data emanating from EHR systems and enhance the American Medical Association's key aim of “data liquidity.”
See also HRS White Paper on Interoperability of Data from Cardiac Implantable Electronic Devices.
IHE is an initiative undertaken by healthcare professionals and industry to facilitate and strengthen the sharing of clinical data among health information technology (IT) systems. Systems developed in accordance with IHE communicate with one another more readily and completely, are easier to implement, and enable care providers to use information more effectively. Stated simply, the goal of IHE is to support specifications that increase software and hardware functionality and usability in health IT.