Speaking at the recent Digital Healthcare Conference, Epic CEO and founder Judy Faulkner “said she is a bit worried about standards as a double-edged sword - standards might improve communications, but limit innovation and new ideas”.
I couldn't disagree more. Innovation and new ideas depend on improved communications. You can't move forward without stabilizing the foundations of your business, and that's what standards are for. They ensure shared understanding, and you can't get progress without
shared understanding.
Getting more picky, innovation and new ideas aren't the same concept. Innovation is about the realization of ideas, not the having of ideas. Despite what you might have heard, having new ideas is easy. Figuring out which ones might work, and then getting them to work, is the
tough part. I guess the thought behind Faulkner's statement is that standards are a traitjacket – they force people to think in defined ways. This is a fallacy. People use shared vocabularies to articulate extraordinary new thoughts every second of every day.
Standards aren't weapons. They're tools. Used appropriately, they can help you achieve great things. This is clear from another statement made at the event: “Paul D. Smith, a professor of medicine at UW-Madison who has worked on two EHR implementation projects, said part of the problem with giving patients access to their EHRs is that there’s 'no data standard' for the
technology and the various EHR vendors hold their work proprietary.”
Comments