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September 25, 2008

Today, it seems that more and more decision makers in the healthcare field and especially in healthcare IT policy simply don't understand the basic underlying problems of interoperability in healthcare applications. They also fail to realize how critical those applications need to work together seamlessly.

There are also some open source developers that don't either. Today is the last day of Epi2008, where a pre-Congress 1.5 day workshop on OSHIP/openEHR was held.

There are some groups of people calling for many different minimum data sets. Some will say it's safe to assume that there is no way today that all these different minimum data sets will ever be implemented in all healthcare applications.

After yesterday's workshop, some of the participants attended sessions and spoke with a variety of epidemiologists, health policy and health economics experts. Most of these people are researchers and are looking for information from a variety of data sources including primary care health records.

The legitimate use of information to help them make more informed decisions in health care delivery needs is always a good thing, and is the main focus of the Epi 2008 Conference.

The annual event is in it's fifth running. Next year's show promises to be even more entertaining, according to the event's organizers.

However, the problem isn't even the data sets themselves... It's more that the context for the data in modern healthcare applications is simply trapped in the core of the software that is being used in the first place.

Ask any healthcare software developer or system integrator that has been in this business for at least five to six years and he will tell you.

The semantic context cannot be moved from one health application to another unless it is part of the data itself, and this can create some serious problems.

If this would be unacceptable for an airline company, bank or financial services institution then why is it that some participants still think that it is acceptable in the healthcare industry?

The answer is in the question you say? Think again...

Overall, there is much more to all of this than can be described in just a simple online article. More access to information is urgently needed in an effort to better assist healthcare IT managers and healthcare developers, whether they use commercial or open source software.

We've applied for Epi2009 and we've already registered two seats for next year's conference. It will be interesting to see if there was any progress done in this sector over the period of those twelve months.

Source: IT Direction.

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