about us
HealthcareITInteroperability.com is a technical information resource for the healthcare IT interoperability community. Our mission is to explain Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) concepts, the current challenges of EHR implementation, and to connect you with the Healthcare IT resources, organizations, work groups, and conference events you need to achieve interoperability for your organization.
If all of your healthcare providers promptly gave you a secure standardized digital record of all your clinical information at the end of your appointments, as well as the ability to control and distribute your information, we would be well along the road to interoperability. To achieve interoperability one must carefully orchestrate a complex architecture and business process flow both within and without your organization to assemble the many pieces of a constantly changing puzzle. The exchange of semantically meaningful data is key to interoperability. The Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) create and develop data standards, for example HL7.
Our Mission
Our intent is to answer questions such as:
- Why is healthcare so far behind in its ability to share data?
- What is interoperability?
- Why are data models needed?
- How do you achieve interoperability?
- Why is messaging important?
- What role does data modeling have in the identification of enterprise resources and requirements?
- What is data architecture?
- How are privacy and security achieved?
- Which organizations determine and develop standards?
- Where can one download a particular standard?
- How can data standards help us achieve interoperability?
methods
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Simplified Explanations
We aim to provide simplified technical explanations of IT Issues. We try to explain the technical jargon in everyday terms so that an IT person without a healthcare IT background or a manager without an IT background can understand the concepts. We maintain a list of Academic Resources, Communities, a calendar of Events and Conferences and point you to websites which may help you.
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Interviews with Top Leaders
We interview IT leaders to get the best possible explanations of complex issues. We interview data architects, standards architects, data modelers, and terminologists with Healthcare IT experience to explain the concepts. In addition, we will point you to our analysis of the news and latest developments.
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Terminology
What role does terminology play in interoperability, and what can a good terminology server accomplish for you? These common terminologies are used by various enterprises, governments, and other organizations. These entities all agree to speak a particular subset of medical terminology so a precise meaning is known. They list medical concepts and the directly related words in a reference table. Medical Informaticists need to understand which standard terminologies to use, where to find them and how to use them.