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Tech Giants Push Open Standards for Health Network
securitas writes "The New York Times' Steve Lohr reports that 'Eight of the nation's largest technology companies, including I.B.M., Microsoft and Oracle, have agreed to embrace open, nonproprietary technology standards as the software building blocks for a national health information network.' Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Computer Sciences have formed the Interoperability Consortium to build a health information network proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The network is the first step in moving from paper to electronic patient records and sharing health data between doctors, researchers, insurers and hospitals. Mirrors at IHT and CNet News.com with additional coverage at IDG/ComputerWorld Australia."
After all, an apple a day keeps the doctor away...
Somehow Microsoft got into the same sentence as non-proprietary
Please correct and resubmit
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Thats the sort of stuff the National Heath Service (NHS)In england would dream of. We are spending Billions of pounds coming up with a integrated health record system and now this comes out!!.
I for one welcome our new open, nonproprietary technology standard overlords.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I would say they are further behind than that. The incredibly poor communication between providers and insurers is one of my pet peeves. Transactions often take many months to clear, and involve numerous cryptic paper printouts, and often must be mediated by patients with no clue as to what the codes mean. Just how hard can this be?
More than once a doctor or hospital in a PPO network has started hounding me over an unpaid balance that the insurer was supposed to cover. They called me up and tell me that I should coax the insurer to pay up. I'm usually a calm person, but this was just too much. *They're* the ones who entered into a contractual agreement with the insurance company when they joined the network. *They're* the ones with multimillion dollar mainframe systems who can communicate with the insurer's multimillion dollar mainframe systems. Why the hell do I need to get on the phone to try to fix their data interchange problems? Do they have kindergardners running their IT operations?
The couple of times I've had to use this rant on their pesky bill collectors, it seems to have worked. The charges mysteriously got settled.
Health Care IT can learn from the mistakes of the 90s
Yeah, I work in healthcare IT and we're not waiting until 2009 to start updating our code for Y2K! Unlike the rest of people in IT who waited until the last minute.