Why Customizable is Better than Customized

Interoperable health portals need to be customizable as opposed to having one-time customized interfaces

Buildings are not standard. If you take a walk through New York City, you’ll see buildings with stairs, no stairs, exits, fire escapes, signs, automatic doors, doormen, no doormen, and the list goes on. Safety measures are standard; building designs are not. This is a decision of circumstance or branding.

EHRs and HIEs are also not standard; however, each player is trying to be the standard. Because of this, a few providers will choose one standard and a few others, another and by time you know it, none of them can communicate with each other. That is why it is better for EHRs and HIEs to be customizable and not just customized to what portals think providers want.

Any player in this industry knows about HiMSS and their collaborative efforts in health IT. HiMSS realized that platforms which wanted to brand themselves as a one-time, standard EHR/HIE did not always deliver on information exchange. Last year, they created a certification program to test EHRs and HIEs to see if they were fully interoperable. They had two main goals: one, to help providers meet meaningful use and two, to certify platforms that enabled health data exchange.

The problem with one-time customized portals is that they don’t focus on design or safety. If they are designed to meet providers’ needs, what about the patient’s needs? Patients need to work with the system, too, or else providers will be left with a partial view of their patients’ health. If data exchange was not in the foundation of their platform designs, then secure data exchange was not a priority to them. “Standard” platforms are non-scalable and cannot be functional for both a provider and their network.

Now that meaningful use is on its way out, the market is open to all vendors to accomplish the feat of interoperability. As a PHR platform, MediPortal allows providers to build their own customizable data exchange platform over their existing EHR/HIE infastructure. When the company became a contributing member of the CommonWell Health Alliance, it expanded across a larger provider base. MediPortal is the only platform within the Alliance that is not tethered to an EHR and is completely patient-centric.

Going back to the building analogy, it’s okay for security to be standardized, in fact, all EHR/HIE vendors should be encrypting their clients’ information to keep them secure. However, vendors should steer away from branding themselves as THE standard platform to obliterate all platforms. Providers have already gotten their gears turning with their EHRs, they won’t scrap it and start over with the next big thing.

Healthcare cannot run on the next big thing; it has to run on what actually works and delivers.