Healthcare organizations run on a complex web of interconnected systems — EHRs, lab systems, billing systems, pharmacy systems — that must exchange data reliably. HIM2670 covers the strategic decisions and governance structures that keep that ecosystem functional.
Health IT infrastructure and system selection
HIM2670 surveys the major categories of health information systems — electronic health records (EHR), practice management systems, laboratory information systems, and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) — and the criteria organizations use to select among competing vendors: functionality fit, total cost of ownership, vendor stability, and interoperability with existing systems.
Interoperability and IT governance
The course covers interoperability standards (like HL7 and FHIR) that allow different health IT systems to exchange data meaningfully, and the persistent real-world challenges when systems from different vendors don't interoperate smoothly. Students also study IT governance structures — who decides on system changes, how data standards are enforced across departments, and how organizations balance clinical staff preferences against IT security and compliance requirements.
Key topics in HIM2670
- Major health IT system categories: EHR, practice management, LIS, PACS
- System selection criteria: functionality, total cost of ownership, vendor stability
- Interoperability standards: HL7, FHIR, and real-world interoperability challenges
- IT governance structures and decision rights for health IT changes
- Balancing clinical usability against security and compliance requirements
- EHR implementation project phases and common implementation failure points
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Worked example: an interoperability failure and its fix
- Problem: A hospital's EHR and an affiliated lab's information system use different data formats, causing lab results to arrive as unstructured PDFs rather than structured, searchable data
- Consequence: Clinicians can't easily trend lab values over time, and the data can't be used in automated clinical decision support
- Fix: Implement an HL7/FHIR-based interface engine that translates lab data into a structured format the EHR can ingest natively
- Lesson: Interoperability isn't just a technical nice-to-have — it directly affects clinical usability and patient safety
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Frequently asked questions
Interoperability is the ability of different health information systems — potentially from different vendors, built on different underlying architectures — to exchange data in a way that preserves its meaning, so that a receiving system can actually use the data (not just receive a file it can't interpret). It's difficult to achieve because healthcare data is complex and historically each vendor built proprietary data structures optimized for their own system, meaning genuine interoperability requires either universal adoption of shared standards (like HL7 or the newer FHIR standard) or costly custom interface engines to translate between systems. HIM2670 teaches that even when standards exist, real-world interoperability often still fails due to inconsistent implementation — two systems might both claim HL7 compliance but implement it slightly differently, requiring additional customization — which is why interoperability remains an ongoing challenge industry-wide rather than a solved problem once a standard exists on paper.
IT governance refers to the decision-making structures and processes that determine who has authority to approve changes to information systems, how competing priorities (like a clinical department's feature request versus an IT security requirement) get resolved, and how data standards and policies are enforced consistently across an organization. In healthcare specifically, IT governance matters enormously because health IT decisions sit at the intersection of clinical usability (a poorly designed EHR workflow can genuinely slow down patient care or contribute to clinician burnout), regulatory compliance (HIPAA security requirements aren't optional), and financial sustainability (health IT systems are extremely expensive to implement and maintain). HIM2670 teaches that without clear IT governance, healthcare organizations often end up with fragmented systems, inconsistent data standards, and unclear accountability when something goes wrong — a governance committee with genuine cross-functional representation (clinical, IT, compliance, and finance) is generally considered a best practice specifically because no single department's priorities should unilaterally drive health IT decisions.