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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."

11 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.

    1. Re:About time ... by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      5-10 years? You're being too kind. As of when I left Terre Haute Medlab in the late 90s/early 00s (I forget exactly when), they were still required to transmit their data via bisync modem. It was one of those "We could have saved a lot of money just by burning CDs and driving them a couple hours away if they had allowed us" situations.

      But yeah, the paper situation really needs to be resolved. A site that I know from my current job is looking into a system where interviewers conducting research on patients will use tablet pcs with the forms on them. The data is automatically entered from the digital forms into the database, where it can be shared cross site with appropriate access restrictions. No need to have two people enter the data to insure data entry correctness, or anything like that (although you may still want two raters).

      Back at Terre Haute Medlab, they had an office of a dozen or so people whose job it was simply to type in to the system printouts of records spit out from a different system. In short, the data was going from the doctor and the patient, to paper records, to a digital record, to a printed record, to a digital record again, which was then transmitted via bisync, often multiple times if there was an error in the batch, each transmission taking overnight... oy, it was just a complete mess.

      If you wonder why healthcare costs are so much in the US, you have to at least consider things like this a contributing factor.

      --
      People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
    2. Re:About time ... by BWJones · · Score: 4, Informative

      Personally I think the main reason is the malpractice insurance that docs have to pay.

      This is certainly part of the problem. Let me give you an example: My mother (a physician), used to love delivering her patients babies. It was one of the high points of her practice. Then one day, we were going over her budget for the practice and we discovered to our horror that every baby she delivered was costing her $200 because of insurance and other costs. Note: she has never been sued either. So, we made the business decision to stop delivering babies. But here is the real galling thing: She has to maintain an insurance trailer that goes down a little every year, until the last baby she delivered turns 21!. Is it any wonder they tried to discourage me from going into medicine? Is it any wonder that physicians are abandoning medical practices left and right in this country? There are also other regulatory issues physicians have to deal with that would boggle the mind. No other business in the US has to deal with these issues to the degree that physicians do.

      --
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  2. Where's Apple? by Foozy · · Score: 4, Funny

    After all, an apple a day keeps the doctor away...

  3. Typo in Submisson by jaymzter · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. 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
  5. I for one... by fizban · · Score: 4, Funny

    I for one welcome our new open, nonproprietary technology standard overlords.

    --

    +1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.

  6. "Insurers"? by CrystalFalcon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The network is the first step in moving from paper to electronic patient records and sharing health data between doctors, researchers, insurers and hospitals.

    This was completely mind-boggling to me, until I realized we're talking about the big ole US of A.

    If a commercial enterprise that was supposed to be working in my interests got access to my medical data here in Europe, there'd be fucking hell to pay. Heads would roll.

    Can't see why you keep putting up with it.

  7. 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.
  8. Freedom Of Information Act by amdg · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been following this story for some time now. For me, the cool thing about this quasi-open-source project is that it will be built using source code that was released to the public thanks to the US FOIA (Freedom of Information Act).

    This software was built years ago by the Department of Veterans Affairs for its hospitals and clinics. Similar commercial software is easily sold for over US$1 Million. I would love to see more software developed by the US government with taxpayer money released into the public so that the open source community can benefit. If you know of any government software that could be useful, file a FOIA request! (Assuming of course that it does not violate national security, yada, yada.)

    For more info on this software and other open source stuff going on in the healthcare world, see these links:

  9. 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.