August 24-25, 2006, Cologne, Germany
| International HL7 Interoperability Conference IHIC 2006
August 24-25, 2006, Cologne, Germany |
|
||
To the IHIC 2006 conference program committee
Email: r.a.stegwee@utwente.nl
Robert A. Stegwee
Professor of eHealth Architectures and Standards
University of Twente
PO Box 217
7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
+31 53 489 39 92
+31 53 489 21 59
r.a.stegwee@utwente.nl
Robert Stegwee is professor of eHealth Architectures and Standards at the School of Business, Public Administration and Technology of the University of Twente and principle consultant for Information Technology in Healthcare with Capgemini Consulting. He has chaired the department of Business Information Systems at the University of Twente and has been area leader for eCommerce and eGovernance of the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology with this university. He has been track chair for Healthcare Information Systems at IRMA, HICSS and ECIS conferences. He has previously held positions in industry and with the University of Groningen.
Identifying different types of standards to achieve interoperability in healthcare
research
45 minutes
This research attempts to provide structure to the types of standards needed to achieve different levels of interoperability within a specific domain, in this case healthcare. Both theoretical background and practical examples are provided to better understand the levels of interoperability and the types of standards needed to achieve them.
Communication is at the core of society, and a networked society needs to adopt
standards to achieve effective communication. However, from a practical point of view, it
is often hard to find out what a particular standard actually has to offer. This problem
becomes even more serious when it comes to domain specific standards. To what extent
different domain specific standards cover the same ground and lead to the same results
is often not easy to find out. This paper explores the nature of available standards with
respect to the contribution they make toward standardizing the communication within a
specific domain, notably healthcare. To achieve this, the notion of interoperability is expanded beyond the
computer science definition towards an organizational context, in which the
interoperability has to demonstrate itself. In addition, different kinds of communication
between organizational systems and different levels of interoperability are defined. To
this end the paper addresses the different kinds of issues that need to be tackled and
illustrates to what extent different standards can actually fulfill these needs. The ultimate
aim is to focus the attention of standards development organizations on the type of
standard they want to produce and also to provide for a more clear understanding of the
possibilities to attain true interoperability given the (set of) standards that are available for
a particular domain.