Fighting the Interoperability Battle

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Interoperability, compatibility, orconnectivity all refer to people and devices working together forproductivity. When is this going to become a reality? As long as wehave competition and profit greedy businesses and people, this is notlikely to happen. Everyone is so concerned about proprietary rightsand squeezing the maximum amount of profit out of a product that theyare unwilling to work together for fear that another company mightlearn something from their device.
A step in the right direction may havehappened on January 14, 2013 when the Masimo Foundation hosted thePatient Safety Science & Technology Summit in LagunaNiguel, California. This inaugural event convened hospitaladministrators, medical technology companies, patient advocates andclinicians to identify solutions to some of today’s most pressingpatient safety issues. This is the report of Peter Pronovost fromJohn Hopkins in his blog on Armstrong Institute.
Then on January 21, Mike Hoskins atDiabetes Mine wrote a blog about Bastian Hauck attending the recentDigital Health Summit, a new part of the annual ConsumerElectronics Show (CES), the world’s biggest tech gathering thatbrought tens of thousands to Las Vegas from Jan. 7-10. Bastianteamed up with the international non-profit Continua HealthAlliance, an industry group focused on standards for medicaldevices to communicate data and synch up to work together.
These two blogs show that people areattempting to bring industries together for the benefit of helpingserve patients and remove barriers to hospital and individualhealthcare. Will they succeed? That remains to be seen. We canhope and pray that companies are big enough to see that by workingtogether now and creating an interoperability standard, that theirprofits could even become larger in the long-term. Consumers canhelp by constantly reminding them that divided they will fall. Consumers are becoming more tech savvy and may just find ways toprofit from the inactivity of overly greedy companies.
If this has you interested, you maywish to read a related article about the Patient Safety Science &Technology Summit and thePatient Safety Pledge that appears at the end of the article.
I am also encouraged that the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has the Office ofStandards and Interoperability (OSI) to:

• Encourage development of health IT standards
• Move toward the seamless exchange of health data across all stakeholders: Federal agencies; State, local, and tribal governments; and the private sector

To achieve these goals, OSI's rolesinclude:

• Enabling stakeholders to come up with simple, shared solutions to common information exchange challenges
• Curating (overseeing) a portfolio of standards, services, and policies that accelerate information exchange
• Enforcing compliance with validated information exchange standards, services, and policies — to assure interoperability among validated systems

Read more about this here.