Healthcare Standards: Too Many, Too Few, Not interoperable [Updated Update]

Global standard for avian vaccines needed - expert

Dec 8, 2005 By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - International standards should be set for avian vaccines to combat the spread of the deadly H5N1 bird flu in chickens, a leading virologist said on Thursday.

Unlike influenza vaccines for humans which must contain a minimum amount of antigen to stimulate an immune response, no figure had been stipulated for avian vaccines, said Dr Robert Webster of St Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

"We should at least establish a minimal level," he told a briefing during a meeting on emerging diseases in London.

"There are no international standards. There should be."

11/07/05; Vol. 24 No. 32 "HHS lays out a plan to have e-health records on the table by next June" By Mary Mosquera, GCN Staff

HHS last month awarded $17.3 million in contracts to harmonize standards, create a process for health IT product certification and assess the variations in state privacy laws.

Under the standardization contract, the American National Standards Institute of New York will bring together other standards development organizations to form the Health Information Technology Standards Panel. The group will evaluate and reconcile existing standards that enable interoperability among applications, starting with the use cases that the public-private American Health Information Community recommended.

The initial cases for health IT applications are for chronic care management, disease or bioterror surveillance and a personal health record, said John Halamka, chairman of the Health IT Standards Panel and Harvard Medical School CIO. His panel also will review the standards that contractors propose for national health IT network prototypes.

“By [next] summer, we’ll have the implementation guide on the three use cases and recommend standards for the NHIN,” he said.

Standards development organizations already have done a lot of work in the breakthrough cases. The Health IT Standards Panel is creating an inventory of inventories of all their work to create a master standards inventory. The panel hopes it will make evident the standards on which the groups could agree.

“Some use cases may offer low-hanging fruit, in that they’ll find different standards development organizations use the same or duplicative standards,” Halamka said.

Later this month, the panel will assess the inventory for standard matches for one of the health IT use cases.

IBM: Government Should Provide Muscle for Healthcare Standards 

Feb. 19, 2005 By M. L. Baker, eWeek.com

At a panel about how information access could improve health care, Carol Kovac, general manager of IBM Healthcare, repeated a joke: "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from," she said. The point is that health care IT has a surfeit of standards, and many of them overlap and are incompatible. The government could be the impetus for solving this problem if "it has the will," she said, noting that the cynics might question this will, given the federal budget deficit.

E-health Records Slow to Catch on

Feb. 21, 2005 by Heather Havenstein (COMPUTERWORLD)

High costs, lack of standards for exchanging data hold up plan for national health network

Interoperability problems and lagging adoption of electronic health record technology are challenging the federal government's efforts to foster the creation of a national information health network, said the Bush administration's point man for health care IT last week.

Health care IT managers countered that they need incentives to offset the hefty capital investment necessary to computerize health records, as well as nationwide standards to ease the exchange of data with other health care organizations.

Brailer: 'Time is Running Short' for Needed Standards

Feb. 22, 2005 By Neil Versel, Contributing editor, Health-IT.com

Dallas -- Despite working virtually nonstop since taking the job last May, national health-IT coordinator David Brailer, M.D., is urging the industry to redouble its efforts to create interoperable electronic health records for most Americans.

"We have a long road ahead, but we have real urgency. Time is running short," Brailer said Thursday in his keynote address to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Dallas.

"We can't wait until the end to make the tough decisions to get the results we all want. We need to attack the core issues and barriers right now," Brailer urged.

"If interoperability is not solidified and built into EHRs, a generation of investment will be lost and an opportunity for fundamental improvement in care delivery will be gone," he cautioned.

Health IT Czar to Industry: Act Now to Adopt Common Standards

Feb. 23, 2005 By M. L. Baker, eWeek.com

The National Health IT Coordinator told a group of industry executives that they must come up with a set of standards to make EHRs (electronic health records) interoperable, and hinted that failure to do so could result in government regulation.

"Interoperability must be addressed now, or else widespread adoption of stand-alone EHRs will be a fait accomplis," he said in remarks at the annual meeting of HIMSS (Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society), held this month in Dallas.