Un/Standardization in Healthcare Informatics

The importance of standardization in an industry, cannot be under stated, without standards, we would not be having many of the stuffs we enjoy now. And it is the lack of standardization which is holding back Healthcare Informatics from exploding.
Make no mistake, I am not saying that healthcare informatics lack in standards, no it does not. But the process of implementation and educating the industry on what needs to be implemented and complied with is what is lacking. Take HISA (Health informatics Service Architecture) for example, its a worldwide ISO standard, (ISO 12967), its a great standard, it details out the description, planning and development of new health information systems architecture; the integration of existing electronic health systems, both intra- and inter-organizationally; using architecture that integrates common data and business logic into middleware; which is then made available throughout whole information systems.
3 main parts:
– Enterprise Viewpoint
-Information Viewpoint
– Computational Viewpoint
The only issue with HISA, is that it is too generic, and not specific, meaning, it is not meant for someone to just “pick it up” and start implementing within
healthcare sector. Its almost right to say that its the “TOGAF standards” for Healthcare Informatics. TOGAF as most people know is too generic and often
requires extensive amount of tailoring, experience and requires other supporting standard like ITIL, CMMI, Agile, PMI and others to go along. Same in
healthcare informatics. We should be having the following list as the core standards on top of HISA (being the horizontal standard):
– HL7 for Clinical Application to Application protocol
– DICOM for Radiology Application integration
– ASTM / LOINC – for Lab Application integration
– CCD – as for Medical Records Format
– ICD 9/10 – for Diease Code
– MIMS – for Drug Code
– SNOMED CT – Comprehensive clinical health terminology
– EN 13606 – Electronic Health Record Communication
– IHTSDO – International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO)
The above set of standards, should be the recipe for any planning, development, deployment, and change management of healthcare projects, particularly
focusing on medical records, hospital information systems, EHR and EMR, integration or upgrading.
Note:
CCD (Continuity of Care Document) is by ASTM & HL7
CCR + CDA = CCD (Something like this)
Paving path towards a Healthcare Enterprise Architecture & Technology [HEAT] standard…