Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD Discusses the Current State of US Interoperability and Implications for Learning Health Systems

Julia Adler-Milstein, Ph.D., a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research at the University of California, San Francisco, said, “When we talk about HIE [health information exchange], at its most fundamental level, it's about getting access to the data that one needs to understand the problem of interest. When information isn't flowing, we are impaired in our ability to turn data into knowledge and then to assess the performance piece to turn it back into data.”

Speaking Dec. 7 to the Learning Health System Collaboratory at the University of Michigan Medical School, Adler-Milstein said she has seen many efforts that are bumping into our interoperability shortcomings as they're trying to pursue learning health system projects.

Researchers often perceive that the data they are looking for is siloed and inaccessible. “That makes it hard to pursue progress on their health problem of interest,” she said. Even within a single health system, without good HIE, you can't get complete data on the individual. “Where exchange HIE capabilities exist, they are not always well-aligned with where patients are going to get their care,” Adler-Milstein explained. “You can't really know what happened to a patient after they were seen in a hospital because you don't know or have information about all the different places that they went next. Did they get readmitted to another hospital that you may not be aware of? With better HIE, we could do a better job of learning about what's working for a given patient or not.”

 

Excerpt taken from “Are Interoperability Woes Hampering Learning Health System Efforts?” by David Raths. Read full article here: https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/clinical-it/learning-health-systems-research/article/21249449/are-interoperability-woes-limiting-learning-health-system-efforts