Requirements for and Barriers towards Interoperable eHealth Technology in Primary Care

Despite eHealth technology's rapid growth, eHealth applications are rarely embedded within primary care, mostly because systems lack interoperability. This article identifies requirements for, and barriers towards, interoperable eHealth technology from healthcare professionals' perspective - the people who decide when (and which) patients use the technology. After distributing surveys and performing interviews, the authors coded the data and applied thematic analyses. They subdivided results according to levels of interoperability, as workflow process, information, applications, and IT infrastructure. They found that implementing interoperable eHealth technology in primary care succeeds only when all identified levels of interoperability are taken into account.