2. Interoperability
Interoperability is the ability to work together in an oganized manner. Applied to electronic medical records, interoperability means the ability of large computer databases containing patient information to effectively communicate with each other and ultimately communicate the data to healthcare providers quickly in a meaningful way (Brodersen et al., 2016).
Even though the Internet has been has been transmitting data around the world for almost 50 years now, critically important medical data remains for the most part hidden away tightly in silos, run by hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies. This tight lock on patient records means that even when going a short distance within the same town it is difficult to access medical records from a different clinic. Although the clinic is in the same city, the silo housing medical records is just as isolated as if it was located thousands of miles away. These silos effectively control medical records, instead of the patient controlling their own medical records (Mandl and Kohane, 2012). Because of the hassle of transferring medical records, many patients will stay within a single healthcare system for the sole reason that their medical records are housed within that system.