Tired of trying to tie data together with the electronic equivalent of bailing wire? A blog post this week contained what I think is some great news for those interested in standards and interoperability.
I have been a follower of John Halamka, CIO at Harvard Medical School, for a number of years. My first exposure to him was a story that appeared in CIO magazine back in early 2003 related to a major IT failure at Beth Israel over which he presided. The article was as refreshing as it was informative – a senior executive standing up and openly talking about a problem that happened on his watch. How often do we see industry executives “spinning” problems instead of letting a high-profile magazine describe it in all the gory details. John’s spin: “"I made a mistake.” Awesome.
Among his many duties, Dr. Halamka is chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP). For those that may not recognize that group (and if you don’t, you need to), it is an organization focusing on health system interoperability, and has been a significant driver behind national standards development supporting healthcare information exchange. In my world, there are really 5 sets of standards I care about: IT standards (e.g., W3C, WS-I), CDISC, HL7, HIPAA, and HITSP.
