To Micky Tripathi — who leads the ONC at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — improving, enhancing, and streamlining all aspects of interoperability throughout American healthcare is essential.

“I think all of us want the comfort and confidence that providers have the best available information to make the best decisions,” Tripathi said. “There are also lots of benefits to not having things done over and over again simply because one doctor doesn’t have access to the information from the other doctor.” …

Tripathi does underline that there is a ton of interoperability already going on — whether it’s a nationwide network performing around 50 million transactions a day or local networks doing smaller amounts of separate transactions.

“But we still have a lot of gaps,” he said, “and part of that is due to the fragmentation of the healthcare delivery system in this country. It’s not really a system. It’s just a bunch of providers — like physician offices and hospitals — doing their best to connect with each other. But it’s a fragmented system both on the supply side and the demand side. That makes it really hard for everyone to come to an agreement on an industry-wide approach for interoperability.” … Read the full article here.