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More about interoperability at the Healthcare Forum

The Open Group Healthcare Forum seeks to advance interoperability to exchange key health and healthcare data. We believe secure information should follow the person in a timely manner, wherever he or she goes for care. When healthcare systems interoperate a great deal more than today their activities will be more efficient and they will create added value. 

The Healthcare Forum’s orientation to the interoperability problem is holistic and systems-oriented. Members do not believe IT problems merely require technical solutions. Instead, it draws on multi-dimensional – e.g., business, technical, digital, organizational, socio-cultural – solutions to develop precise and explicit understandings of the interdependence of the key elements of the health delivery system ecosystem. This approach is closely aligned with efforts to address the goals expressed in Boundaryless Information Flow™ the triple aim, the learning healthcare system, value-based healthcare, evidence-based medicine, pay-for-performance, the healthcare continuum, and population health.

There is no simple fix – no silver bullet, no technical innovation, no congressional mandate – that can rapidly transform healthcare systems that don’t now share information into fully interoperable ones. We understand the complexity of the task.

The Healthcare Forum takes a person-centered, value-based approach to understanding healthcare enterprises and the role health IT can play in lowering costs and improving quality and access. Through weekly WebEx meetings and quarterly in-person Events, Forum Members share diverse perspectives that help their companies avoid short-sighted, expensive solutions to business problems.  The Forum's key work products--the O-HERA and the FHIM--are innovative, open, and accessible.