Dispatch from Japan and New Zealand

This week I ’ve taken vacation time to help my colleagues in Japan and New Zealand with national IT planning.  As I often say, the healthcare IT challenges are the same all over the world, but the cultural context is different.In Japan, I spent 2 days in Tokyo and 1 day in Kyoto, lecturing, meeting, and listening to stakeholders.  There is a great desire to share data for care coordination and clinical trials/clinical research.  Telemedicine/telehealth is increasingly important in an aging Japanese society that has increasing healthcare needs but a limited number of caregivers and few opportunities to increase healthcare budgets. Here are a few of the current issues we discussed:1. Some early data exchange pilots in Japan have used a healthcare specific XML form called Medical Markup Language (MML). Others have used IHE standards such as XDS.b . There is not universal adoption of a specific content standard among the majority of Japanese EHRs, many of which are custom created for each hospital.  I recommended that Japan adopt CCDA as a summary content standard and FHIR as a query/response standard.2. There is limited adoption of controlled vocabularies.  SNOMED-CT, LOINC, and ICD-10 are used in pockets, but are not mandated by national or local regulations.   There is some early work being done on OpenEHR and the use of schemas/archtetypes to represent data in a semantically interoperable way.  I rec...

Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - February 8, 2017 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs