What If There Was an Election on Healthcare Standards?
February 8th, 2008 by Jon Mertz
(15 votes, average: 4.93 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted in CCR, CCD, CDA, Healthcare Integration, HL7 Standards
By now, you may have had enough of primaries and election results. What if, however, we applied the primary election process to healthcare standards? What would happen?
Just as there are factions the political candidates are trying to pull together to win, they probably have not seen as many factions as there are in healthcare standards. There is a major faction called the HL7 Standards, but emerging factions are getting noticed which are XML related - from Continuity of Care Record (CCR) to a faction-within-a faction, that is, HL7 V2, HL7 V3, HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), and HL7 Continuity of Care Document (CCD).
We don’t need new healthcare standards. We just need to enforce the ones we have.
What about the X12, DICOM, NCPDP, ASTM, LOINC, and SNOMED factions? And, let us not forget the common person’s healthcare standard - plain ol’ CSV file formats.
If the United States was going to eventually elect a healthcare standard to lead us in the 21st century, which one would win? All we need is a little harmony.
Harmony may be over-rated. How could someone from SNOMED endorse the LOINC? What do you mean CCR is campaigning with CCD? If these events happened, some people may just sit out the healthcare standards election.
What about the special interests? Each healthcare vendor has their own standard. Let’s hope that someone doesn’t “swift boat” one of the healthcare standard candidates.
The campaign slogans: Healthcare standards are broken. We just don’t need to move the same standards to different chairs. We need to stand for change. We need hope! We need a healthcare standard ready to solve all of our problems Day 1!
Or, maybe what we need is another healthcare standard - a “third party” candidate - that can just end all of the “politics” and work for the people in health care. A “uniter” of healthcare standards. Some standard that can “reach across the aisle” and reach consensus.
Can’t we all just get along in the healthcare integration world?
Yes, this is a parody of sorts on healthcare standards, but it is the practical world that we live in. There are many standards, and we do all need to get along in order to deliver the best possible care for patients. Each healthcare standard faction delivers an essential piece in the healthcare puzzle, but putting the puzzle together can be challenging at times.
Maybe the final rallying cry should be: “Read my lips. No new healthcare standards!”
Last 5 posts by Jon Mertz
- Hospitals Creating Their Own Networks - August 18th, 2008
- Healthcare Unbound Conference Insights - July 15th, 2008
- Electronic Medical Record Perspectives Grow - June 27th, 2008
- EMRs for Free... Really? - June 23rd, 2008
- HL7 Continuity of Care Document Quick Start Guide - June 12th, 2008
The HITSP group is harmonizing the differences between standards and identifying which ones to use for specific use cases. www.hitsp.org. This is the “primary convention” of standards.
-Lyle
This is not such a parody - afterall standards processes are far more political than technical. Such an election makes two assumptions, first that the marketplace would want any candidate at all, and second that the convention would be honest, as in not rigged. History has shown that both of these premises are higly questionable.
Having multiple standard candidates devaluate meaning of the “standard” itself.
It was much better if we had one standard for both imaging and informatics (now we have DICOM and HL7).
I would vote for HL7 (and base64) in this case.
The real election that happens is what comes to hospital floor. We had enourmous amount of standards and initiatives, but when you come to the floor you see only DICOM and HL7 2.x
IHE tries to be uniter, but as you mention, it did not win the election yet and when I do interfaces for some system, I cannot guarrantee my customer that his system will encounter mostly IHE compliant systems in hospital environment. The opposite is true.