Question: Interoperability vs Integration

Dec 2, 2011

A regular Chinese correspondent asks:

What is the difference between the terms interoperability and integration when it comes to healthcare or health information exchange? I am often embarressed when other asked me, I realize I could find a good point to explain these two. Could you give me some help?

This is a very good question, and it’s not surprising that it’s hard to differentiate the two - after all, see here, here, and here. (and that’s in English. I don’t know how it translates into Chinese).

My take is that integration is something you do with systems leading to an achievement - getting them to exchange data. Interoperability is a property of the systems that makes it easy (or easier) to do integration. I’ve heard several other HL7 leaders offer similar definitions as well.

Note that by this definition, HL7 is about interoperability, not integration - HL7 offers standards that aopplications