An article about progressing with health data interoperability between the VA and DOD in the absence of full industry data standards leaves me unconvinced. I agree sharing data is critical and standards take time to evolve. But I'm not so sure there are technological short-cuts.
Lynda Joseph cites some technical approaches which might help parties to interoperate, but I believe they'd still need to create a lot of workarounds in order to get any real utility. In the past, piecemeal solutions based around current technical capabilities have served as obstacles to growth in data sharing and exploitation. Workarounds are expensive to implement and difficult to decommission.
I think a better approach is to reject the idea that standards have to take a long time to emerge. Sure, standards will be late to the party if there's no leadership and they're developed against a background of heterogeneous, ad-hoc solutions. But we can do better than this. If you're involved in health care data, you've got to agitate for standards – and maybe you need to ask yourself whether it's time to step forward and lead the necessary acceleration. You'll be doing all humankind a favor. NextGov
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