Respond to your colleagues. Explain how their chosen national healthcare issue/stressor may also impact your work setting and what (if anything) is being done to address the national healthcare issue/stressor.

Respond to your colleagues. Explain how their chosen national healthcare issue/stressor may also impact your work setting and what (if anything) is being done to address the national healthcare issue/stressor.

At least 2 references in each peer responses!

Interoperability is the integration of multiple information systems applications and devices to allow for real-time, cost-effective, and equitable consumer data access. It improves healthcare coordination as providers can access, retrieve, and exchange information, based on mutual cooperation and trust across multiple organizations and regional boundaries (Lehne, Sass, Essenwanger, Schepers & Thun, 2019). Although a significant majority of healthcare organizations in the US have shifted from paper-based records to electronic health records following the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, interoperability is yet to achieve significant traction in the health system (Shull, 2019). Interoperability and consumer data access promote information portability and secure data and information sharing to add value to workflows. It minimizes the risk for care fragmentation, duplicity or missed healthcare services and averts the likelihood of grave medical errors. Lack of interconnected and integrated health systems at my facility inhibits real-time timely access to patient information and data for individuals receiving medical care from other providers (Reisman, 2017). It creates inefficient workflows, as using manual methods to gather data from previous health providers through phone calls or methods such as emails that require waiting for responses is time-consuming and cost-ineffective. It is essential that clinicians are able to access data bout patients’ past medical histories, payers, medication, and other important data in a timely manner to provide high-quality care that is relevant to the present medical issues. Issues such as high costs interconnecting systems and privacy concerns about patients’ health records and the use of different electronic health records act as barriers to effective interoperability (Reisman, 2017). My health facility has collaborated with other health organizations within the local community to address the safety and security issues hindering consumer data access such as information theft. The group of organizations intends to pool resources to share high costs of developing interconnected systems that comply with HIPPA rules and regulations.