Areas of Expertise
- Health IT Standards and Informatics
- Interoperability
- Cybersecurity
Recent Press Coverage
- Tracking trends in health IT standards
- Healthcare Cybersecurity: Plenty of Work to Do
- Governance is the Thorniest Issue to Tackle
Social Media
Areas of Interest
- Health IT standards, regulatory compliance, certification testing
- Standards development organizations and ecosystem
- Cybersecurity, privacy, risk management, interoperability
Points of View
We’re at the point where everyone knows how great it would be if everyone had things like remote patient monitoring and immunization registries available right now. For the past 20 years, you’d have every excuse in the world not to implement them. Now having and using these tools becomes a life and death issue, and we need to make sure they are integrated into a broader ecosystem.
For standards, we are going to be able to collect a lot of data. If we collect data in the right format, we’ll be able to make that data actionable instead of just trapped in a file. We want it to be standardized, digitized and to really take advantage of digital health. We have a huge opportunity for revolution in digital health.
We have standards for just about everything, like the transport of information, for messages, electronic prescriptions, lab results, immunizations, a blood pressure reading and oxygen levels from a pulse oximeter. Folks can represent that data their own way, a proprietary way, or they can use a standards-based way.
In healthcare, we are making a concerted effort to modernize our standards. We want anyone to be able to pick up their smartphone, pull up their record, and know their latest lab results, their medication list, their problem list, hit a couple of buttons and share it with their new doctor. We’re not there yet, but these are the types of things we’d like to do.
This work is a mix of policy, people and technology. You have to pay attention to all of these pieces.
