Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Pettus, VP of
Connectivity at CareFusion, we were part of a Panel on The Future of
Interoperability at the BIOMEDevice conference in San Jose, CA. During our prep for our discussion,
Dan provided his view of interoperability, he said that it is more than an
technical interface, but the relationship between two systems to communication
on multiple layers as well being in sync with each other to the extent that if
one side is not working the peer will be affected. He provided an example, let’s say that you have an infusion pump that
is connected to an EHR and you receive a formulary update in the EHR, the
infusion pump(s) must be updated ASAP.
Intelligence must be built into the system to recognize that the update
must be sent downstream to the pumps and that the pumps themselves need to be
aware of required updates when they comes online.
I had never really thought of interoperability this way,
before our conversation. Endpoint
devices do have more than a technical interface, the easy part of
interoperability. We must consider what
other systems are affected when one side of the interface is updated. We must also take into account how workflows
may be affected with peer updates
When we plan
integrations of devices or systems we need to think about the unintended consequences of interoperability.
