ONC, West Health See Mobile Interoperability Saving $30B Annually

If mobile medical devices had greater interoperability, which means they could better communicate with each other, the nation could avoid more than $30 billion a year in wasteful healthcare spending, according to a joint white paper by the Gary and Mary West Health Institute, a San Diego-based mobile health technology advocacy organization, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

“Waste reduction through greater medical device interoperability would lead to increased efficiency, improved quality and more affordable care,” the report authors note. “Commonly adopted standards can accelerate the move toward greater medical device interoperability and potentially reduce the cost of achieving interoperability. With all of the caveats associated with estimating the value of a process improvement not yet deployed, our combined top-down and bottom-up modeling suggests that annual savings in excess of $30 billion may be liberated by widespread adoption of functional interoperability for medical devices.”

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Source: Modern Healthcare