UTDGC

In order to further break down the topic at hand lets first imagine a hospital were interoperable EMRs had no standards. This would be a hospital were communicating multi-disciplines shared private and personal information without set rules for confidentiality (including financial and personal information) and no constitution for editing (such as a medical assistant having the same access as a doctor for editing an EMR). While these guidelines (confidentiality and hierarchy) for interoperability are crucial in order for EMRs to be practical, I do not see a set of "standards" being implemented across all forms of healthcare using EMRs. I do believe that most hospitals will implement their own well defined guidelines the govern interoperable EMRs, however, I do not believe that interoperability(the communication of multiple disciplines) is ineffective without a universal set standard.

The National Alliance for Health Information Technology defines interoperability as the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, to exchange data accurately, effectively, and consistently, and to use the information that has been exchanged (NAHIT, 2006). The key concept of interoperability is sharing, not something that is new to the healthcare industry as doctors, nurses, and other healthcare administrative members have always been able to pass papers with various clinical informative data around the hospital or office, all be it with high constrictions due to the physical nature of "paper charting". With the introduction of the EMR interoperability becomes the main goal of the health care industry, however strict standards need to be met for the EMR to succeed. The "sharing" of information from one person to the next requires that all personnel dealing with confidental EMRs need to adhere to a set of standards, without these standards interoperability would compromise HIPPA.