I work in infrastructure for an EHR provider, so interoperability isn't really my area, but I do work with devs who must do this.
I'd say the problem is approximately zero to do with HIPAA; we almost never even talk about it in my experience. It's just a lack of standards, and poor implementations of what standards do exist - every once in awhile something will crash because of a weird escape character or something in an HL7 message (though that could be on us no doubt).
I believe last year was the first time that there was a mandated standard to export EHR data and one of the devs was complaining that it didn't even say if units should be imperial or metric.
I'm told the labs are a complete mess and have no federally mandated standards; I know they've written code because doctor X wants to use lab Y. Obviously the big national labs win because you only have to write code for them once and all customers can use them.
It's just another aspect of a broken American healthcare "system" - there's no incentive for anyone to interoperate in the best case, and in the worst case it allows you to create lock-in for your product.
I'd say the problem is approximately zero to do with HIPAA; we almost never even talk about it in my experience. It's just a lack of standards, and poor implementations of what standards do exist - every once in awhile something will crash because of a weird escape character or something in an HL7 message (though that could be on us no doubt).
I believe last year was the first time that there was a mandated standard to export EHR data and one of the devs was complaining that it didn't even say if units should be imperial or metric.
I'm told the labs are a complete mess and have no federally mandated standards; I know they've written code because doctor X wants to use lab Y. Obviously the big national labs win because you only have to write code for them once and all customers can use them.
It's just another aspect of a broken American healthcare "system" - there's no incentive for anyone to interoperate in the best case, and in the worst case it allows you to create lock-in for your product.