Custom EHR Development: Interoperability, Security & Compliance

Despite the high adoption rate of EHR software systems in the healthcare industry, interoperability still remains a critical issue in the healthcare landscape. According to a study, almost 69% of providers experience problems in establishing smooth connections between other practices and local systems.

Moreover, almost 80% of critical medical errors are often the results of miscommunication during care transitions. This has been the driving factor of healthcare practices shifting to custom healthcare software solutions and especially custom EHR software systems.

This shift has not only allowed healthcare practices to address their specific needs and requirements but also solve the pre-existing issues in the evolving healthcare landscape. The major issues being the interoperability, security and adhering to regulatory compliances, EHR development solves these issues while also contributing to enhancing better care practices. However, that is the topic for another blog on building your own EHR.

In this blog, let’s explore the interoperability, security and compliance facets as best practices for EHR development and overcoming EHR implementation hurdles.

Interoperability – The Key to Seamless Data Exchange

Interoperability in a nutshell is the ability of the computer system to seamlessly connect and exchange information with other disparate systems. Given the collaborative nature of the healthcare industry, achieving interoperability can solve the issue of collaborative care.

With interoperability, every member of the care team is brought on the same to work together towards the same goal which is to provide better care. However, achieving interoperability is easier said than done and can be a major challenge in EHR development. That is why many healthcare practices still complain about connectivity in the current healthcare systems.

Moreover, depending on your unique needs and requirements, you need to adopt different levels of interoperability. Here’s a quick overview for understanding interoperability better:

1. Foundational Interoperability: This is the basic level of interoperability that allows your system to seamlessly exchange data with one another without any errors. Perfectly suited for healthcare systems who just want to transmit and receive data from different healthcare systems.

2. Structural Interoperability: This level of interoperability focuses on the format and structure of the exchanged data, since different systems use different formats and structures to store data. Furthermore, it is more suitable for healthcare systems that define the common standards and protocols for data exchange such as HL7 FHIR, which are a crucial cornerstone of healthcare interoperability.

3. Semantic Interoperability: This level of interoperability focuses on the meaning of data that is being exchanged between the systems. In simple terms, with semantic interoperability, your system and connected systems get the ability to understand the data while sending and receiving. Semantic interoperability involves using common vocabularies and ontologies to represent the data in a consistent way.

With a basic understanding of the level of interoperability, you can easily choose the one that suits your healthcare system the best. However, the importance of interoperability standards and protocols such as HL7, FHIR or DICOM cannot be ignored. This helps in defining the data structure and can oftentimes be the deciding factor for your system to seamlessly exchange data.

Robust Security Measure to Protect Sensitive Patient Data

As a healthcare professional, you know the importance of sensitive patient data. Furthermore, improving patient care with custom EHR, it automatically becomes your responsibility to safeguard patient information and to ensure EHR data security with ethical use.

Moreover, when you exchange this information with disparate healthcare systems, there is a high chance that the data might get breached. This might not only compromise the privacy of the patients but also impact the practice in many ways, such as reputation damage and even hefty fines.

To overcome these common security threats, here are some of the robust security measures that you can take to protect sensitive patient data:

1. Encryptions: By implementing robust encryption algorithms you can easily encrypt data into a new and unreadable format called as cipher text, where even if the data is breached during transmission it cannot be read unless you have the key. The key is shared between healthcare IT systems, which ensures the integrity of data and adds another layer of protection.

2. Access Controls: The threat of unauthorized access is another concern that many healthcare providers face. By implementing role-based access control, you can ensure EHR data security by only allowing authorized personnel to access data.

3. Regular Security Audits: While your system deals with patient data, it also generates some data of its own. A sneak-peek into it can give you access to deeper insights that might help you in identifying loopholes in your security system. By conducting regular security audits, you can easily identify and address these gaps in system security.

Last but not least, one of the best practices to strengthen the security of your custom EHR software is by adhering to the regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, GDPR, HITECH Act, etc. With your EMR software developers complying by these guidelines, you can ensure all the security measures are taken and help you seamlessly navigate through the healthcare IT security ecosystem and also legal landscape.

Compliance with Healthcare Regulations

As the technological landscape is evolving, it is changing the healthcare IT landscape also. This is one of the major reasons why the regulatory landscape of healthcare IT is complex as well as ever changing. However, in this transition age of digital healthcare practices, key regulations govern the security and ethical use of healthcare data.

Some of the key regulations that you need to adhere to are:

1. HIPAA: It stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It was passed by the government of the USA, and its purpose is to protect sensitive patient health information (PHI). The key provisions in this involve a privacy rule that sets standards for the ethical use and safeguarding of PHI and a security rule for protecting PHI on physical, technical, and administrative levels. Last but not least, a breach notification rule involves notifying the Department of Health and Human Services of breaches if they take place.

2. HITECH Act: HITECT Act stands for Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, and it promotes the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology. It is quite similar to...LEARN MORE