Treating patients with half the chart, with Sandra Johnson of CliniComp

Forty-seven percent of chief information officers (CIOs) named cost as their top barrier to interoperability in a survey CliniComp conducted with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Foundation, according to Sandra Johnson, senior vice president of client services at CliniComp. She says the barrier has shifted from technology and standards to cost and vendor unwillingness.

Medical Economics Managing Editor Todd Shryock sat down with Johnson, whose company CliniComp makes electronic health record (EHR) systems for hospitals and health systems.

Johnson says data stuck in disconnected systems leaves physicians treating patients with only half the chart, which carries a clinical cost as well as a financial one. She credits vendor consolidation, policy and government incentives with connecting more systems and says the next step is making that data usable at the point of care. She argues health systems need to treat interoperability as core infrastructure instead of bolting new tools onto old systems.

She also discusses whether data blocking is still a problem, how patient identity matching fits in and why artificial intelligence (AI) running on siloed data works from partial information. Every CIO in the survey said AI running on interoperable systems was important to their organization, she says.

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Editor's note: Episode timestamps and transcript produced using AI tools.

0:00 – 0:33 | Cold open. Sandra Johnson on why siloed data leaves physicians treating patients with half the chart.

0:33 – 1:50 | Introduction. Austin Littrell introduces the episode and the guest and previews the Physicians Practice Practice Academy on Oct. 29.

1:50 – 3:03 | Cost is now the barrier. Johnson says 47% of CIOs in the CHIME survey named cost as their top barrier, making interoperability a business problem more than a technical one.

3:03 – 3:53 | Treating patients with half the chart. Siloed data carries a clinical and human cost as well as a financial one.

3:53 – 5:14 | How interoperability got this far. Vendor consolidation, policy and government incentives connected more systems, and the next step is making that data usable at the point of care.

5:14 – 6:13 | Treating interoperability as infrastructure. Johnson says bolting tools onto existing systems doesn't build interoperability, and health systems need a core foundation that can scale.

6:13 – 7:00 | Is data blocking still a problem? Johnson calls it a market failure that every part of the industry has to help fix.

7:00 – 7:59 | P2 Management Minute. Keith Reynolds shares practice management tips and invites listeners to submit their own workflow ideas.

7:59 – 8:42 | Patient identity matching. Johnson says normalizing data across systems is the key to a complete view of the patient.

8:42 – 9:38 | Where AI fits. Every CIO surveyed said AI running on interoperable systems matters, but AI built on siloed data sees only part of the patient.

9:38 – 10:32 | Who's the bottleneck? Johnson says no single stakeholder is to blame and CIOs want industry consortiums where EHR vendors and health systems share ownership of the problem.

10:32 – 11:31 | Interoperability in five years. Johnson describes a complete view of every patient at the point of care, with technology helping clinicians instead of getting in their way.

11:31 – 12:24 | What doctors should do now. Johnson urges physicians to tell their IT teams where fragmented data slows down clinical decisions.

12:24 – End | Outro. Littrell reminds listeners about the Oct. 29 Practice Academy and wraps the episode.