Next: The Crisis in e-health standards II
Background
There is a serious problem in e-health today. The main need in e-health is to establish interoperability of various kinds: between systems, between software components, and across enterprises. The current catchphrase is ‘semantic interoperability’, generally meaning that information can be shared (between systems), aggregated (into a single standardised whole), and computed upon, in such a way that originally disparate information about, say a patient, can be safely analysed by a computer program. Achieving this is undeniably hard – I know from having spend 15 years of my life on it. Nevertheless, I know it is solvable. Technically there are many challenges, but also available solutions. It is the political dimension that is harder: this is a ‘commons’ problem, as is any interoperability problem, and it therefore requires the presence of organisations in the public space – usually governments and/or standards organisations. This is recognised, and many countries now have some kind of national ‘e-health programme’ which endeavours to define and promulgate (and possibly legislate) various standards and guidelines to encourage interoperability of health information systems (naturally, within privacy legislation). Continue reading