Five years ago the eHealth solutions shown on this map of the world: http://tinyurl.com/wwxds did not exist, but they now provide better quality and more productive healthcare for millions of patients. The happy accident that led to the Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) and XDS for Imaging (XDS-I) profiles in Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise would not have occurred without the supporting International communication standards and the dedicated experts and companies that supported their development. Many regional and Federal initiatives in the US successfully adopted the previously mentioned profiles and their underlying standards.
Current US regulation and funding will dramatically increase the use of ICT standards in healthcare. More than 100 new initiatives were just announced at a cost of around $750 million US dollars. Without coordination there will be a lot of new invention, much of which could ignore standards. This is a shotgun approach that needs more focus to be successful.
My own experiences with the US Federal initiatives around eHealth are mixed. My chief complaint is that we do not have a “national program” the way other countries do. We have a loosely agglutinated collection of initiatives that do not communicate. The lack of a Federal eHealth strategy on standardization has been getting in the way, even inside the government itself. Competition between standards organizations is also a problem.
The diversity of organizations and initiatives where one must participate is daunting. There needs to be a way to communicate across these initiatives and the standards organizations. The Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) formed by ANSI four years ago helped to drive communication for the US. However, HITSP’s contract with the Federal government recently expired, and a request for proposal to replace that organization has been delayed, but is expected in the next couple months. A more unified effort should be sought which includes representation of national interests to standards bodies.
Where governments can truly help is insuring that there is a consolidated voice across the ICT spectrum, and setting national goals that can be driven into standardization efforts.
Biography Keith W Boone
Keith W. Boone is a Standards Architect for GE Healthcare. In this role he represents GE Healthcare to standards organizations such as HL7 International, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, ANSI/HITSP, ISO TC 215, ASTM and Continua. Keith cochairs committees in HL7, IHE and HITSP, and is also an instructor for the Continituity of Care Document tutorials given by HL7. Keith entered the field of healthcare in 2001 and has more than 25 years experience in software development. He brought his extensive background in Internet and document markup standards to healthcare, and quickly became a leader in the use of standards such as the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture. He lives just south of Boston, Massachusetts and writes regularly about standards at motorcycleguy.blogspot.com.
