The ONC announced its efforts to achieve interoperability by 2017. It’s ambitious, intelligent and potentially a huge boon to patients and the healthcare system as a whole.
With that caveat established, let us (or me) begin the official rallying cry to find a more consumer-friendly word than “interoperablity.”
Seriously, the life sciences crowd gets “precision medicine” to describe its major public-private effort to improve the healthcare system — easy to grasp, even fun to day; the health IT crowd gets “interoperablity,” which , as anyone who’s tried to type the word more than once for a story knows, is neither fun to say nor write. By MS Word standards — clearly the definitive linguistic source in the 21st Century — it’s not even a word. Take that, Miriam Webster.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Imagine what “interoperablity” does for our SEO when it’s in headlines. Or, ask Jeff Overly over at Law 360 how enticing that word is to non-health IT people.
@David_Pittman @DanVerel my new editor today instantly killed story about ehr interoperability bc she said it “sounds like a yawner”
— Jeff Overley (@JeffOverley) January 30, 2015
The everyday consumer can likely wrap their heads around the concept of precision medicine, even if it’s slightly off kilter itself. Thanks, Obama. Same with “big data” and “telemedicine.” But try explaining “interoperability,” or even saying it with a straight face, to your grandmother at the dinner table. Or your friends at the bar over beers. It’s hard enough just saying the word, beer or no beer. It’s an eight-syllable monstrosity.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
To be clear, this is not to undermine the concept. Anyone who’s paid even slight attention to health IT knows the exchange of data from one big EHR system to the next is no small deal. Even more so on a national level. The promise is almost mind boggling if it can be achieved. So, too, is the challenge, and those tackling the problem deserve a tremendous amount of credit.
I realize this is not limited to health IT. I also realize the people who work on issues of interoperablity are way smarter than me, so this is by now means intended as a slight to the cause or those behind it.
But, in this brave new consumer-driven healthcare world, surely we can come up with something more accessible than interoperablity. Some suggestions: “national patient data exchange.” Or perhaps “shared medicine.” Shared-medicine initiative has a much nicer ring to it than “interoperablity,” does it not? Suggestions are welcome.
[Photo by Flickr user Andrew Malone]
