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Is the Health Data Liquidity Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

Glass What a difference in attitude! Compare two press announcements from April 5:

1) CCHIT:  Interoperability Isn’t Doable With Today’s Technology .

Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), Interoperability: Supplying the Building Blocks for a Patient-centered EHR , April 5, 2009

This report…(is)  also an attempt to inject a dose of reality into the discussion of interoperability – from practical expectations for the near term and future years to the challenges of developing software architecture and implementation guides that can execute new interoperability criteria uniformly and successfully.

2) New York Presbyterian/Microsoft: We’re Creating Patient Data Liquidity Today!

New York-Presbyterian Hospital Pioneers New Personal Health Record, Press Release; April 6, 2009

Patients can reference their actual, up-to-date health records, which are organized and stored through Microsoft’s Amalga and HealthVault technologies and stored by the patient in a personal account following visits to their hospital, doctors and health care providers.

Here are more details:

A Hospital is Offering Digital Records , The New York Times; April 5, 2009

N.Y. Hospital Taps Microsoft to Digitize Records , cnet News; April 5, 2009

HealthVault & NY Presbyterian – Closing the Loop on Care , Chilmark Research blog; April 6, 2009

Microsoft introduces Amalga UIS 2009 , Wisconsin Technology Network; April 6, 2009

While the CCHIT report explains in great detail why data interoperability is not feasible today, the NYP/Microsoft partnership documents that creating data liquidity (appropriate flow and exchange of health information) is very doable today.

To be fair, the comparison between CCHIT and NYP/Microsoft is not an apples to apples comparison. From the NYT article:

If a patient gets all or nearly all his or her care in one health system, then the personal health record will be rich in information, and very useful, Dr. Brailer said. But if some doctors or clinics put information in and others do not, it will be less useful. The ideal, he said, is for most patient information to be in digital form and, with safeguards for privacy, be collaboratively shared by health providers and patients.

But I would much rather see the glass as half full.

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1 Comment

  1. David C. Kibbe, MD MBA on April 11, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    Nice post, Vince. It reminds me of the statement made by then CEO and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation Ken Snopes in 1977, when asked about personal computers. “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,” he opined dismissively. I think the same is happening here, when people dismiss the value of having one’s personal health information available. The attitude is “leave it to us experts and our big machines.”

    Kind regards, dCK