- Healthcare Blockchain Frameworks Emerge as Demand Rises
- Why Blockchain May Not Be the Solution to EHR Interoperability
All healthcare technology vendors are invited to participate in the IHMI. Early members include IBM and Cerner. As healthcare organizations continue to digitally transform their IT infrastructures, a shared data framework becomes more pressing.
“We spend more than three trillion dollars a year on health care in America and generate more health data than ever before. Yet some of the most meaningful data – data to unlock potential improvements in patient outcomes – is fragmented, inaccessible or incomplete,” AMA CEO James L. Madara, M.D. said in a statement.
“The collaborative effort of IHMI will help the health system learn how to collect, organize, and exchange patient-centered data in a common structure that captures what is most important for improving care and long-term wellness, and transform the data into a rich stream of accessible and actionable information,” he continued.
The AMA is currently focused on the following areas with IHMI:
- Hosting clinical and issue-based communities focused on costly and burdensome areas. This fosters collaborative efforts around common interests and areas of need, such as hypertension management, diabetes prevention, asthma function, and identifying the best available science and practices that define patient-centric care.
- Providing a clinical validation process to determine and apply appropriate clinical frameworks. Participants will provide contributions and feedback online to specify data elements and relationships. Clinical content submissions will go through a validation process to review clinical applicability.
- Specifying a model to encode information in the IHMI data model. Clinical content will enable configurations of the model and reference value sets that can be distributed.
A shared data model can potentially help organizations take a more patient-centric approach to treatment. Clinicians can access data throughout a patient’s history and use it to tailor treatment based on her history, lifestyle, and goals.
Healthcare technology professionals have expressed their desire for a standard framework over the past several years as the amount of data brings interoperability issues to the forefront. New technologies are also being developed for IT infrastructures that will depend heavily on a standardized data model.
Blockchain is beginning to be heavily considered in healthcare, for example. One of the uses includes putting patients at the center of their own care by giving them control over their records. However, issues arise when the data is not in the same standard everywhere the patient goes.
If there isn’t a universal way for a provider to be able to identify a patient and receive their data, blockchain becomes useless.
“Until we have a national patient identifier, blockchain is worthless,” VMware Senior Healthcare Strategist Chris Logan told HITInfrastrucutre.com in a previous interview. “How am I supposed to know it’s your record at the end of the day, if I don’t know it’s you? One of the biggest problems healthcare organizations have is identifying the patient when they come into the organization.”
Establishing a standard data framework is a critical step for organizations embracing new technology in their IT infrastructure. The more data collected, the more organized it needs to be for it to be retrieved and used effectively.
By 