Big Data, Incrementally Structured: The go-forward interoperability philosophy.

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM, Plenary Session II

Bob Dolin, MD, President and Chief Medical Officer, Lantana Consulting Group; Vice Chair, HL7 Board of Directors

Healthcare is, well, should be a data-driven business. As in any other business, it’s about the data. But in healthcare we are challenged by seemingly competing needs – the clinician’s need for fast and intuitive data capture, the enterprise need for structured and coded data, the clinician’s need to minimize disruption to workflow, the software developer’s need for unambiguous data. We are hungry for data in healthcare. To drive quality reporting, to drive decision support, to drive all kinds of care improvement initiatives, we need data, and we need a lot of data, and we need good clean data.

The direct approach to getting healthcare data isn’t working. We can get to the data more efficiently and satisfy the competing needs above by taking an indirect route. Our go-forward philosophy in healthcare interoperability is “big data, incrementally structured” and involves moving semi-structured data today, while incrementally enhancing the structure of that data over time. It’s not a novel strategy–consider how it has worked for Google and the Internet. Imagine if Google had said, “We’re only going to spider websites that have these 17 metadata fields correctly populated.” Instead, Google said, “Give us what you’ve got, the more the better, and sure, if it’s structured then so much the better.”



Bob Dolin, MD, FACP, incoming Chair of Health Level Seven International standards development organization and primary author of many of the HITECH Meaningful Use standards, will focus his presentation on how the “big data, incrementally structured” philosophy is being operationalized in the United States. Key interoperability standards, cited under HITECH Meaningful Use, are poised to deliver unprecedented data, in the context of clinical documents that support the needs of front line clinicians. This session will introduce the audience to the strategy, to the types of data flowing today, and to what we envision will be flowing in the near term.

Event Information: http://www.weyond.com/himss/socal/acis/2013/

Children’s Hospital of Orange County
Wade Education Center
455 S. Main St.
Orange, CA 92868