As this recent HealthcareIT News article points out, interoperability buzz has reached a fever pitch since the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released its long-awaited draft roadmap to interoperability.

Much of the excitement focuses on electronic health record systems (EHRs), and their potential to maximize the promise of interoperability. But as Joyce Sensmeier, RN, HIMSS vice president of informatics, notes in the same article, “EHRs are just part of the story.”

“Over the last couple years … we focused on the technical aspect of interoperability, and while of course that’s an important part, I think we’ve missed out on thinking about the providers, the individual clinicians as well as the organizations,” Sensmeier says.

To this point, one of the most important things your organization can do now – while interoperability is still gearing up for Prime Time – is to look at how well your clinicians, patients and technologies are working together.

For example, it’s not uncommon for clinicians to use ordinary cameras – such as digital SLR and even phone cameras – to capture various dermatological and other pathologies. They then download the images to their computers before printing and either scanning them or sending them to the HIM department to be scanned for storage in the EHR and/or shared with other providers.

Release of information documentation is another instance: Patients often need this information sent to other providers, yet many clinicians must use several different systems to access that documentation, print it, fax it, and then shred it when they’re finished.

To put it mildly, clunky workflows such as these likely won’t play well in the game of interoperability. And no matter how advanced your EHR, some aspect of patient care inevitably risks being overlooked and left behind.

You might think you have a decent information management system in place. However, to avoid costly oversights and identify hidden clogs within your workflow, it may be worth performing a comprehensive process assessment to identify where your information comes from, where it’s intended to go and, most importantly, how well it makes that journey so you can easily capture, access and share data.

There’s no doubt that a lot of confusion still exists around interoperability, and it will take time for things to shake out. In the meantime, your healthcare organization can use this time as an opportunity to examine its workflows with an eye toward improving operations and building confidence in its systems.