Interoperability

Sources and review notes

These links support definition-level research and do not establish the regulatory status, safety, or suitability of any product.

ONC describes interoperability as both exchanging electronic health information and using information received from other systems without special effort by the user; exchange alone is therefore necessary but not sufficient. ONC's USCDI and standardized-API certification materials illustrate that interoperability claims must name a data scope, standards and implementation specifications, operations, authorization and testing criteria. HL7 FHIR similarly requires versions, resources, profiles, terminology and exposed capabilities to be identified. Buyers should define the intended actors, organizations, patient population, data classes, direction, latency and workflow outcome, then verify endpoint products and versions; legal authority, consent and purpose of use; patient, provider and encounter matching; transport, authentication and authorization; message or API contracts; profiles, required elements, code systems, units and provenance; completeness, timeliness and update semantics; acknowledgements, errors, retries and reconciliation; read and write behavior; clinician review; monitoring, downtime, version change and exit procedures; and tests using representative normal, missing, conflicting, stale, duplicate and unauthorized data. Technical connectivity or standards conformance does not by itself establish semantic agreement, organizational readiness, complete and correct data, usable presentation, regulatory compliance, clinical safety or successful end-to-end workflow performance.

• Source 1: healthit.gov/interoperability/
• Source 2: healthit.gov/data/data-briefs/laboratory-interoperability-through-health-information-exchange-organizations/
• Source 3: healthit.gov/test-method/united-states-core-data-for-interoperability-uscdi/
• Source 4: healthit.gov/test-method/standardized-api-for-patient-and-population-services-acb-atl/