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Tech Giants Push Open Standards for Health Network

Posted by michael on from the eschewing-proprietariness dept.

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."

5 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. About time ... by malcomvetter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Finally ... now maybe health care systems won't rely on dial-up as their primary method of sharing information from facility to facility.

    Amazingly enough, health care is probably 5-10 years behind in IT. The optimistic note: Health Care IT can learn from the mistakes of the 90s (which they were thinking about implementing next quarter- honest) and with movements like this, perhaps they can finally adopt proven standards.

  2. Interoperability and sharing... by PornMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Interoperability and sharing are all kinds of nice for the interchange of information, but what happens when a third-party developer comes up with something that can also plug-in, so it gets access to the data, but has some kind of big open hole in other parts of its code, so everyone's records are available to anyone?

    Without resorting to a paranoid rant about huge databases where authorized people have access to my personal data... what about the unauthorized?

    For some reason, I don't see a security framework coming down the line that is *good*, consistent, and enforced by the system as a whole.

    --
    500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
    1. Re:Interoperability and sharing... by Rei · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You think this isn't already an issue? I for one welcome any upgrades to the system - it's bound to be a lot more secure and have a lot less human eyes on the data.

      At a job I used to work at, there was an officefull of people who really didn't need to be there if the system had just been designed properly to begin with. Each of them looked at huge amounts of personal data every day as they typed it in from one system to another. Then I, as a software developer, had access to all of it when trying to write scripts to ease access to this data. We transmitted it to several places, each of which probably had similarly inefficient and human-intensive systems. No encryption was used at any stage that I'm aware of. I mean, seriously, how is it going to get worse?

      --
      People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
  3. HL7 by Kainaw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anyone who has worked on IT in the health field knows about HL7. It is a free protocol for sharing any and all medical information. As of version 3, it has become XML compliant to allow programmers to use XML parsing tools to read/write data. I don't understand why there is such a need to make a new protocol for sharing health data when one already exists and is in use with most EMR systems.

    --
    The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
  4. As a Hospital IT Professional by 314m678 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I can tell you that this is great news. Our hospital currently has myriad legacy systems running on dinosaur mainframes all linked together buy buggy interfaces which sometimes resort to screen scraping.

    Let me give an example of one of our systems, a text based system, with functionality similar to telnet, when I used it for the first time I noticed that it was slow to open, so I put a ethereal on it and noticed that to connect it sends 8MB of info every time you connect. Approximately 20,000 packets, each with every permutation of two ASCII chars.

    We deal with crap this daily. For another program we are forced to use a non-standard telnet client that takes 100% of the CPU regardless of the machine you are using.

    Open standards that could link admitting, clinical and financial hospital systems will save billions of dollars and probably a few human lives. Additionally, this will allow small software companies and open source coders to make applications that can be widely used. Ive been working on a multi million dollar project the last few months where an aspect of it was completely screwed up because one software vendor uses a non-standard interface that they will not allow us to access directly, as a result, our users have to settle for diminished functionality.

    If encryption is built into this standard it will be a step ahead for HIPPA protection and most systems just send everything, (passwords too) in plain text. I for one, look forward enthusiastically to open source hospital applications made possible by open standards.