I was recently meeting with Gurpreet (GP) Singh from Ellkay when I was in his area. Over dinner we had a great discussion about healthcare interoperability and standards. While many of us know ELLKAY from their work in EHR conversion, it’s really amazing how much ELLKAY has done when it comes to healthcare interoperability and also making that interoperability data useful. In our conversations about the healthcare interoperability landscape, GP said something that really caught my attention:
Standards Are Just a Language, You Still Have to Know How to Talk
I thought this was a beautiful way to describe standards. Knowing a language is one thing. Having the intelligence to know how to use that language to convey an idea and understanding the context of what’s being said is a totally other thing. The same is true with healthcare data standards. It’s one thing to have a standard. It’s another thing to understand the context of the data that’s being shared.
Plus, it’s one thing to have a standard and another thing for people to actually use the standard properly. Imagine if I were speaking another language and then just started doing my own thing. Would people understand me? Of course not. And yet, that’s what we see many people doing with healthcare standards. Sometimes that’s the fault of the standard which is poorly defined or can’t be fully defined. However, more often is companies that don’t fully implement the standard as intended. That’s a big problem when you’re trying to communicate effectively.
What happens when this is the case. Interoperability companies have to translate all of these differing implementations to try and make it make sense for a healthcare organization that’s getting the data. It’s a lot of unneeded hoop jumping. However, that’s where we’re at today.
Back to GP’s comment, where are we at today with interoperability? We have a bunch of standards for data sharing. That’s actually good progress from where we were a decade ago. However, now we need to work on building in the trust associated with the data that’s being shared and the context of the data. Without those things, the data isn’t nearly as useful. It’s like speaking a language, but not really communicating anything useful.
