JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

The digital health sector presents unique and diverse data challenges that manifest as a fractured ecosystem. and often fails to deliver effective collaboration among interconnected entities. The consequences include inconsistencies between services rendered and payments, waste and most importantly, suboptimal care. Interoperabile data is hailed as a near-future solution to many of these challenges and have been so for decades. Paradoxically, interoperability efforts have themselves been fractured and inconsistent, resulting in a plethora of incompatible interoperability standards, despite widespread acknowledgement that fewer standards would provide better interoperability. This paper presents a typology of healthcare data requirements and describes the challenges and opportunities of open data standards in healthcare. Recognizing that different data standards represent different points of view and respond to different needs, and that no single standard would necessarily be able to meet all the requirements of all healthcare systems, we distinguish three domains of healthcare data with their own unique characteristics and challenges, and outline high-level design requirements. We distinguish between requirements that are common across all domains, and those that are specific to each domain.