John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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What is the Golden Rule of Health IT?
December 10, 2008
The post on ZDNet calls for healthcare standards to improve adoption in health IT. One argument is that “vendors lose control of customers when they adhere to standards. This makes them reluctant to adopt standards” and therefore oppose standards or at least drag their feet. He also argues that “Hospitals and insurers gain bottom line benefits, while doctors do not.”
But the most important statement is “So long as hospital computing systems remain proprietary islands of
information, with proprietary drivers and minimum interoperability, the big winners here are going to be vendors, no one else.”
So what is the golden rule: build for standardization and interoperability or “He who has the gold must make the rules.”
