Remember those family vacations when the family packed into the car and drove for miles and miles? Eventually, someone would say what was on everybody’s mind: “When are we going to get there?”

What does it take for a large and rapidly expanding network of neurological practices to treat more than 1,000 patients a day across nearly 50 locations? For starters, it requires the right healthcare IT partner, one capable of integrating thousands of patient records into a seamless workflow. That partner would not only offer industry-leading design and function but would also be on the leading edge of the interoperability solutions that are critical in today’s interconnected world of medicine.

The thousands of eClinicalWorks customers who came to Nashville this weekend expected to hear about improvements to the core EHR, see some new products and services, renew friendships, and have some fun.

In an ideal world, every medical encounter would begin with the provider having the patient’s complete medical history. Every diagnosis. Every medication. Every allergy.

For now, we live in a real world, where information is often scattered throughout medical systems.

Can interoperability defeat the asymmetry beast?

In healthcare IT, the problem isn’t too much data — providers want to know everything they can about individual patients and patient populations — but how to make sense of it all. For many years, medical professionals have devoted countless hours and legions of people to sorting and sifting medical records.