Many news outlets covered a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the current confusion in health data standards. Reporter Allison Bell summed up the core issue neatly: “Just about everyone agrees that the United States should have electronic health data standards, but federal regulators are having trouble actually setting standards and making them stick.”
The report includes the eyebrow-raising information that, in some places, patient records can be conflated if the patients share the same name, birth year, and locality. How, you might ask, could any systems integrator make such a basic mistake?
I believe the answer may be that, despite the widespread use of the term “systems integration”, there's actually very little experience of systems integration within health care. There's not enough appreciation of business architectural issues. Health is late to the integration scene. If you're choosing technical resources, you're more likely to choose someone with health system experience than someone from a different domain who happens to have a greater appreciation of systems integration issues.
The report also highlights that while a number of measures have been taken to encourage greater data standardization, actions and milestones have not been set.
The headline for Bell's article is “GAO: Agencies vague on health data standards”. There's two kinds of vagueness at work here. First is a lack of clarity over domain-wide data standards – such as how you uniquely identify a patient. Second is a lack of specificity about who is meant to be doing what, and by when. The health sector needs to tighten focus in both these areas.
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