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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."
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
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.
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:
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.