The 2016 SHIEC Annual Conference brought the nation’s health information exchanges together to tackle the defining challenge of the field: interoperability in healthcare. AzHeC participated as part of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) community, and this page preserves the themes that mattered then and still shape connected care today.
Why interoperability in healthcare is so hard
Interoperability in healthcare is not a single technical problem — it is a stack of them. Systems must agree on transport (how data moves), vocabulary (what a code means), and identity (whether two records describe the same patient). A conference like SHIEC mattered because it forced exchanges from different states, on different platforms, to align on those layers rather than reinvent them in isolation.
The four levels of interoperability
- Foundational: one system can send data to another.
- Structural: the data arrives in a defined, parseable format.
- Semantic: both systems interpret the data the same way.
- Organizational: governance, policy, and trust agreements let exchange actually happen across institutions.
Patient matching: the unglamorous bottleneck
A recurring 2016 theme — still unresolved — is patient identity. Without a national patient identifier, exchanges rely on probabilistic matching across name, date of birth, and address. Get it wrong and you either miss records or, worse, merge two patients. Much of the conference’s interoperability discussion circled back to this deceptively simple problem.
SHIEC and the Patient Centered Data Home
One of SHIEC’s signature initiatives was the Patient Centered Data Home (PCDH) — a model that routes records back to a patient’s “home” HIE when they receive care elsewhere, using lightweight ADT alerts to trigger exchange. It was a pragmatic answer to interoperability in healthcare: rather than one giant network, connect the regional exchanges to each other.
From standards to FHIR
The 2016 conversation foreshadowed the industry’s move toward modern, API-based exchange. Where earlier interoperability relied on document push and query, the field was beginning its shift to standards that make data accessible as discrete, queryable resources — the direction explored on our HL7 FHIR primer.
Why it still matters at the point of care
Interoperability in healthcare is ultimately judged at the bedside: does the clinician have the right data when they need it? That is increasingly delivered on medical-grade tablets and smart connected devices that consume exchanged data in real time. Teams equipping for that workflow often reference LAC’s diagnostic equipment catalog.
FAQ
What is SHIEC? The Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative, a national association of HIEs (later merged into Civitas Networks for Health).
What is the hardest part of interoperability? Semantic agreement and patient matching — not transport.
Is FHIR the answer? It is a major step forward for structured, API-based exchange, but governance and matching still matter.
Explore our interoperability standards and standards pages, plus news and articles.
This page provides general, historical information and is not medical or legal advice.