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.”

The ONC report then includes this impressive finding.

“Moreover, of the hospitals that electronically send, receive, find, and integrate information, approximately nine out of ten report that they routinely had clinical information needed from outside sources or health care providers available at the point of care, which is about double the national average,” it states.

According to ONC, an increased flow of health information is happening. However, these statistics paint an incomplete and rather complicated picture of health information exchange across the country and beg a few questions to be asked.

What does health information exchange mean? Is all information sharing the same? What is the relationship between the exchange of health data and health IT interoperability?

READ MORE: Solutions for Addressing Health Information Exchange Challenges