Acquire, Integrate, Deliver

As the healthcare informatics initiatives heat up and the EMR market is getting flooded with new software, the visionary in you is probably going, "what am I going to do with all this data"? And your inner visionary would be right.

Standardized Data Definitions & why it's important
It's important to think about how to gather information, organize it and disseminate it in a meaningful way. SDD helps reduce communication errors and improves interoperability with other systems. Standardized Data Definitions is one important step towards achieving this goal. Thinking about this ahead of time, when you are purchasing EMR or CPOE software, will help you get rid of headaches later down the line. The first step to achieving this is coming up with the data definitions themselves. Don't panic! People are already working on it. SNOMED is one of them. They have already achieved success in Clinical Terms definitions. SNOMED CT is available at http://www.ihtsdo.org/ (International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization).

Ontologies
In one of my previous posts, I said "whack us", if we talk about Ontologies. Well, since you are reading this over a computer and there is no great threat of bodily harm to me at this point, I am going to say it. What is an Ontology? The core meaning within computer science is a model for describing the world that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationship types (according to Wikipedia). Why is it important for healthcare? As we generate more and more data, organizing data in an effective manner is essential to a great informatics system. For example, think of a patient as an ontology. It is also a "complex" ontology, meaning it may have more than one "simple" ontology associated with it. For example, vitals of a patient may be considered a simple ontology. Organizing data in ontologies help us define complex data relationships and easier extraction points.

Summary of the matter is this: If we plan upfront, we can deliver better information at the end. There might be painstaking detail to go through in the beginning, but without it, our informatics initiatives fail.

Next week: Interoperability