Data formats and interoperability of health information technology: A qualitative study of the impact on electronic healthy record implementations

Electronic health records (EHRs) have come to be an important tool for the health care field in ensuring the sharing and storage of patient data. These systems, in the past, have been plagued with interoperability and data format issues raising concerns to those organizations and individuals required by law to implement them. Over the past ten years, there have been numerous research studies focused mainly on interoperability within the health information technology (HIT) field; however, these have been limited reviews as to how data formats and interoperability impact these system implementations. This study was focused on identifying data format and interoperability issues and how those may have affected EHR implementations in hospitals in the southwest region of the United States. This study was exploratory in nature and used the methods developed by both Sparks (2009) and Kothari (2004), which allowed the author to explore the phenomena under investigation by interviewing participants that had first-hand knowledge of the issues being studied. Furthermore, the phenomenological methods developed by Giorgi (1985) and Giorgi and Giorgi (2003) were utilized to facilitate the investigation of the phenomena at a deeper level. The author presented results that show a decline in interoperability and data format issues within the organizations investigated.