Opening Up Healthcare Standards

In case you missed the news, in October IBM made its entire patent portfolio available royalty-free for organizations developing standards for the electronic healthcare ecosystem.

Newsweek discusses the larger issue of how "by giving away hundreds of its patents, IBM has turned a philosophical movement into a tangible business strategy."

Here's an excerpt from the story, The Big Blue Yonder.

IBM is especially eager to promote open standards—the blueprints that allow different programs to exchange information—in individual industries. One of the greatest roadblocks to developing such a standard is that some part of the code will unexpectedly infringe on a patent whose owner will start charging fees. The IP team started with health care and education because it is good for people as well as business, says Robert Sutor, Kelly's standards expert. Right now, it is impossible for your medical records from back home to be zapped by e-mail to an emergency room in another city because the different programs cannot talk to each other. Wes Rishel, a Gartner analyst who sits on a standards board for medical records, Ann Arbor, Michigan-based HL7, notes that society could benefit because pooling and analyzing data on patient care would make it easier to figure out the best methods: one study found that failure to provide the best care for diabetes, heart disease and three other conditions accounts for $11.5 billion worth of sick days per year in the United States.

 

IBMHealthNex

Comments

[Julia Weatherby]

Hmmm... having medical records "zapped by email" does not conjure up comforting thoughts of "secure" or "reliable".

Thanks for the sharing the article!

[Jack Mason]

Funny you should mention that Julia. Now that IBM has rolled out a personal health record (through partner WebMD) I've recently set up my Blackberry so that I could fax or email my PHR anywhere, including to a doctor or emergency room.

Of course, the real question is, does a typical ER have a way of receiving my health record this way...on some nearby computer, and what might happen to my info if I ever sent it this way?

For now, I get more of an early adopter buzz just from being able to have a Blackberry-portable PHR, but I suppose the security questions are enormous.

Then again, if I carried around a paper version of my PHR in my briefcase (via WebMD you can export a PDF version) I don't imagine that would be particularly secure.