Ok, I confess, this post is not about Standards enabling Interoperability in eHealth but it will highlight the problems on the lack of Standards in Healthcare.
To cut the story short, I’ll share two points pertaining to me (well, somewhat pertaining);
- I depend heavily on Outlook and my smartphone to organise my schedule and maximise productivity.
- I am using an Android Phone (a very good one – Samsung Galaxy S2)
Well, here is my problem, there is no native or easy way to synchronise Microsoft Outlook and Android devices – none by any reasonable measures.
To make things worst, even when I ‘resign to fate’ and ‘adhered religiously’ to the irrational methods of synchronising data (trust me, there are tons of official methods that doesn’t work well), I lose data – every single time I tried to synchronise the data.
Now this has been causing me minor inconveniences like a missing phone number or appointment that (random numbers and scheduled appointments just simply disappear after syncing the data).
The final straw came when bulk of my calender got wiped out, rendering me helpless, trying hard to figure out what the schedule appointments are – for the entire month (so I’m sorry if I missed / will miss an appointment, I have to blame it on the lack of standards).
The only good thing is, I bought an application – Android-Sync that seems to work decently. Well, not 100% but I’ll live with the minor hiccups, at least my contacts and calenders seems to be in place even after a few synchronisation attempts.
Now imagine the above problems in healthcare. Sounds scary?
Well, be afraid, be very afraid.
The good news is, there are people working towards provision of good standards (that ensures semantic interoperability) but please support our efforts because it is not an easy journey!
BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 