electricians decided to start replacing our standard house outlets … It’s easy to understand when you consider something like electricity. Interoperability could not happen without data standards that establish rules for packaging the data. Interoperability refers to the ability of different IT systems with different infrastructures to share data accurately.
#Standards and interoperability full
Patients need the full message to arrive quickly, accurately, and securely. Unless each child receives the message correctly, stores it in their head correctly, and repeats it correctly (and they never do), the message is a mess when it gets to the end of the line.įunny for kids, not so funny for patients. It’s like the children’s game “telephone.” The first child whispers a message to the second child, who whispers it to the third child, and so on. Every day, for example, I push data from an Oracle database to a Caché database, and then pass that data to an Excel spreadsheet. Whatever the case, data standards make it easier for me to get the right data to the right person at the right time and place.īut there’s a lot of complexity behind those data transactions because each system has its own database, data definitions, and structures. Or maybe a diabetes researcher needs endocrinology reports from the data warehouse. Or perhaps data is pushed from the credentialing database to the EHR to the ePrescribing vendor so the hospital’s newest physician can electronically prescribe medications. Maybe the data is going from the lab system to the EHR to the doctor’s phone at the bedside, making crucial results available at the earliest possible moment. I appreciate data standards! They make my job much easier.Īnd what is my job? To support and improve patient care and patient safety by making data move more quickly, accurately, and securely. Over the past 23 years, I’ve helped design, build, and support data flows among unrelated homegrown and vendor database systems. I work on the EHR project team at an academic medical center.