GIS Data Sharing – A Model for Healthcare Data Interoperability?

For more than a decade, healthcare has struggled with sharing data. We have not achieved data interoperability despite an abundance of technology, standards, and legislation. As an industry, we often point at the banking industry as a model to aspire to, but perhaps a better exemplar is the GIS community. They share their data using open standards and common platforms because they share a common goal – to make the world a better place. Healthcare Data Interoperability Data in healthcare is siloed. The Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) that have been deployed over the past 15 years do a good job at capturing health data but are terrible at sharing it. Only recently have EHR vendors begun rolling out APIs, adopting standards, and developing tools to make their data more interoperable. At the micro-level, the lack of data interoperability means that patient data cannot be easily shared between the hospital that the patient visited and the family physician that regularly takes care of them…or between the nursing home and the urgent care clinic. At a macro-level, the lack of interoperability hampers community health efforts. It takes a lot of time, energy, technology, and skill for any public-health or population-health entity to combine health data from different healthcare organizations. Hospital A’s data must be cleaned, manipulated, and reformatted before it can be combined with Hospital B’s data. It doesn’t have to be this way. If healthcare data was fully...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Analytics/Big Data Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Interoperability IT Infrastructure and Dev Ops ArcGIS Living Atlas CDC Data Diana Lavery esri Esri User Conference FEMA Data Geographic information system Source Type: blogs