Health information exchange is essential to achieving true interoperability, but solutions are necessary for addressing challenges to information sharing.

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“Hospitals and physicians are now exchanging more electronic health information than ever before,” the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology told Congress in an annual report from early November.

It is a statement of fact backed up by rather positive statistics.

“In 2008, 41 percent of all hospitals electronically exchanged health information with outside health care providers,” the report continues. “These rates have since doubled. In 2015, more than eight in ten (82 percent) non-federal acute care hospitals electronically exchanged laboratory results, radiology reports, clinical summaries or medication lists.”