Transcript BCS the IHE or the trouble with standards

BCS & the IHE
or
the trouble with standards
Ian Herbert
Vice Chair, British Computer Society
Health Informatics Forum
The Requirement
Care increasingly cooperative
Patients & HCPs increasingly mobile
Information must follow the patient, and
mean the same wherever it is
Suppliers don’t want to have to design a
specific mechanism for each interaction
with each different system
Purchasers don’t want to be locked in to
a particular supplier □
The Solution
We need semantic interoperability
Standards vital, but must be used
This means enforcement / accreditation
Standards should cover:
 Physical interconnection
 Application interconnection
 Patient data & knowledge representation □
The Players
Hence the current push behind standards
development by :
 CEN in Europe
 Snomed CT internationally
 HL7 multinationally
 OpenEHR multinationally
 ISO, W3C as world bodies
 national bodies eg ANSI, Continua, BSI □
The Result
Many standards – take your pick
They do not share a common
underpinning semantic model, so:
 Their scopes overlap
 There are gaps
 There are competing standards
 There are some semantic conflicts
Many difficult to use, e.g. HL7 v3 □
The Fix?
Need to profile standards deployment to
remove scope overlaps
Need to agree common underpinning
framework
Need to plug the gaps
Needs to be done across standards bodies
But also need to demonstrate that the
standards work, e.g. by implementing real
significant interoperability scenarios □
Enter IHE
IHE a world-wide organisation
It implements real & significant
interoperability scenarios by:
 Selecting & profiling relevant standards
 Publishing the specification
 Demonstrating the results publicly □
IHE & BCS
We welcome IHE UK into BCS HIF
IHE sees this as helping them extend
their mission into work outside imaging
It contributes to BCS HIF’s mission to
develop the full potential of health
informatics
Thank you □